The Digital Child at Play
Rule Systems & Structures
Children's cultural rights??
Digital Bedroom Culture
Authorship
Intellectual Property
Participation
Fair Use/Fair Dealings
Introduction
Microethnographies of Play
Images
Photo: "mix tapes" courtesy of Flickr/Landroid, reprinted in Wired, Oct. 26 2009.
Photo: Hanna Montana fan bedroom, courtesy of RafterTales.com 2008.
Image of Cat from "The Cat in the Hat" by Dr. Seuss, 1957 by Theodore S. Geisel, Random House.
Gossip Girl in Second Life, courtesy of GeekSugar.com, 2007.
"Trick or Treat," photo courtesy of mrmarkrobson.com, 2009.
Cover of Televizion journal, no. 16/2003/1.
Promo image from "Fusion Fall", CartoonNetwork, 2009-2010.
"Club Penguin Gameplay Trailer" posted by MMOHut, Aug. 10. 2009, Youtube.
Lego photo by Lori Decoite, posted Aug.2008 on Suzie Q Scrapper blog.
Original screenshots of BarbieGirls.com, ClubPenguin.com, GalaXseeds.com, PixieHollow.com, Toontown.com, Magi-Nation.com, Nicktropolis.com

Sara M. Grimes
School of Communication
Simon Fraser University 
Vancouver, BC
May 3, 2010
Emergent Play:

Unanticipated & Subversive Appropriations
Designed Emergence:

Incorporation of emergent play into official game lore and design
Configuring the "Digital Child"


Struggling to conform

Fractured Fairy Tales:

The impossibility of following a script
 
Producers as Consumers
User as "Prosumer" - at once a producer and consumer of content
Draw heavily on prefabricated content & themes
Users provide much of the content & use value, but the site owners profit/claim ownership
Role as producer becomes obscured - reframed as consumer relationship

Same ownership patterns - primarily media & toy companies

Same cross-promotional emphasis (tie-ins, branding)

Spaces dedicated to play
Participatory, collaborative
Communities of practice
Social systems
Virtual currencies and markets
Case Study Selection: From 106 to 6
*Club Penguin: over 12 million **BarbieGirls: over 10 million


HOW TECHNOLOGICAL, POLITICAL AND COMMERCIAL RULE SYSTEMS SHAPE CHILDREN’S PLAY IN 
VIRTUAL WORLDS

PhD Defense
MA, BA (Hons)
Conclusions
Implications
Safety Mechanisms
Virtual Worlds for Kids
Virtual Worlds
Similar to T-rated MMOGs
...but also different
Rules as Technical Code
Continuities with commercial children's culture: 
Smaller
Flash-based
Simpler, bare-bones
Less customization
Free/Pay Hybrid 
Microtransactions
The child as indiscriminating player

The child player as consumer

Child's play as "playing nice"

The child player at (and as) risk
Children's Media,                          and Play

Children's Bedroom Culture
Digital Games
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)
Situated within larger context of children's play technologies
Children's Media Studies
Emphasis on cultural shifts, impacts, brought about by the increased presence of commercialization and technologies within children's culture. 
Debates about branded toys & transmedia convergence.

Concerns about play scripts, negative effects, the so-called "disappearance" of imaginative play.


Design Rules
Commercialization as Rule System
Situate digital play within a public / private version of the domestic sphere
"Bedroom" as site of (conspicuous) consumption & display
Expansive, multiuser environments
 
Users interact with each other/environment

Simultaneously, in real time 

Users visually represented as avatars

Persistent (go on without you)

Targeted to teens and adults (T-rated)

Domestic Spaces
Subjectivities of Consumption
Conflation of make-believe and consumption
Performatives & identity play: hinge upon acquisition & display of items 
Social hierarchies 
Technologies
Playing by and with the rules
Significant evidence that kids have power to appropriate, transform and reconfigure meanings, objects, etc.

****Importance of text and context: Narrative, Design, Presence of peers, etc.

Role of design and implementation?


Paths of Influence?
Next-gen kids' MMOGs
UGC Games
More opportunities for participation
But similar rule systems

What are the conditions (of play) introduced by the contents, designs, management strategies, texts and contexts of commercial children's MMOGs? 

How do players negotiate these conditions?
Management Strategies
Shift the focus to the technologies themselves--as sites of struggle, as artifacts that embody and reproduce the social, political, economic & cultural conditions within which they were constructed.
Play Scripts