Creation As Play

While the "dream tech" of Toy Symphony might seem a world away from the "garage tech" of the machinima movement, the commonalities between them -- of changing the view of who creates content and who consumes it -- is to me one of the key ones involving digital change. In machinima, consumer video games (with all their skinning and recording capability) are transformed into real-time animation systems -- but in the form of a tool which is a game (and thus far more accessible to more people than Alias would ever be.) With Toy Symphony, "musical toys" are used by unskilled musicians -- children -- to build orchestral scores played by real concert musicians.

Tod talked about his work in terms of removing barriers, contrasting musical education (which is about mastery of an intrustment and musical notation) to visual education (from the ubiquity of the camcorder to the nearly-play art classes.) He noted that most young musicians, if they reach the conservatory level, aren't really having fun anymore -- the play has been removed from the art, but can be re-injected by removing the need for mastery.

This resonnated with the ILL Clan, for whom the whole artistic tool is an outgrowth of video-game-as-toy (talking, for example, about the amazing machinima features being built by Valve into Half Life 2.) The fact that they could also produce an animated feature just shy of "Toy Story" quality in about 40% less time is just a by-product of a $50 game and a personal PC, an artifact of focused play.

It occurred to me that "creation as play" might even be the key lesson on the Web regarding blogs -- not that all bloggers see their work as play, just that it feels more like play for most of them than "writing" used to feel (say, when their teachers were making them do it, or when it was about the structure of the writing and not the play.)

So maybe that's one feature of digital change as it hits each media -- it demystifies that medium a little further by drawing it more and more towards play.