Digital Playgrounds explores the key developments, trends, debates, and controversies that have shaped children’s commercial digital play spaces over the past two decades. It argues that children’s online playgrounds, virtual worlds, and connected games are much more than mere sources of fun and diversion – they serve as the sites of complex negotiations of power between children, parents, developers, politicians, and other actors with a stake in determining what, how, and where children’s play unfolds.
Through an innovative, transdisciplinary framework combining science and technology studies, critical communication studies, and children’s cultural studies, Digital Playgrounds focuses on the contents and contexts of actual technological artefacts as a necessary entry point for understanding the meanings and politics of children’s digital play. The discussion draws on several research studies on a wide range of digital playgrounds designed and marketed to children aged six to twelve years, revealing how various problematic tendencies prevent most digital play spaces from effectively supporting children’s culture, rights, and – ironically – play.
Digital Playgrounds lays the groundwork for a critical reconsideration of how existing approaches might be used in the development of new regulation, as well as best practices for the industries involved in making children’s digital play spaces. In so doing, it argues that children’s online play spaces be reimagined as a crucial new form of public sphere in which children’s rights and digital citizenship must be prioritized.
By:
Sara Grimes
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions:
Height: 235mm,
Width: 159mm,
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 620g
ISBN: 9781442647442
ISBN 10: 1442647442
Pages: 372
Publication Date: 26 July 2021
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction Digitizing Playgrounds and Technologizing Play What This Book Is About Why Looking Back Helps Us Move Forward Building a Children’s Technology Studies Framework Chapter Overview 1. The Importance of Digital Play Conflicting Views of Children’s Play Conflicting Views of Mediated Play Licensed Toys and Media Supersystems Digital Game Controversies and Dichotomies Dangerous Games and Risky Gamers Games for “Good” Girls Bad Game(r)s, Good Game(r)s Moving Forward Looking at “Stuff” and Structures Resituating Children’s Play Conclusion 2. Small Worlds and Walled Gardens A Brief History of Children’s Digital Playgrounds Online Games: Portals, Arcades, and Environments, 2003–2005 Neopets The Virtual World Boom, 2005–2008 Design Trends and Disparities Beyond the Computer Screen Web-Enabled Consoles Connected Games Go Mobile Toys-to-Life and Cross-Platform Games Conclusion 3. Commercializing Play(grounds) Revisiting Supersystems and Structures Texts and Contexts Affordances and Design Limitations Commercializing Gameplay The Velvet Rope Cross-Promotion and Branding Immersive Third-Party Advertising Brand Ambassadors When Stories, Designs, and Commercial Priorities Align Conclusion 4. From Rules of Play to Censorship The Primacy of Rules in Digital Games Design(ed) Rules Written Rules, Rulebooks, and Codes of Conduct Who Follows the Rules Anyway? Why Breaking Rules Is Important Negotiating Encoded Rules Children Bending, but Not Breaking, the Rules Ice Goths and BarbieBoys Flash Mobs and Copycats Playing in the Margins of Manoeuvre Conclusion 5. Safety First, Privacy Later Children’s Data and Privacy The COPPA Rule Revised Reframing Privacy Protections as Safety Mechanisms Privacy Policies “Safety” by Design Safety as a Key Selling Point Freedom of Expression as a Collateral Cost of Safety Secret Spaces and “Unsafe” Places Unsafe and Risky Play Conclusion 6. Playing as Making and Creating Playing and Making Digital Games Children’s Literacy, Agency, and Cultural Rights Terms of Service, Terms of Play Who Owns Children’s Content in Digital Playgrounds? New Creative Opportunities, Same Old Terms User Rights in Minecraft Fandom and Fair Use as Consumer Practice Conclusion 7. The Politics of Children’s Digital Play Where We Are, and How We Got Here The (Four) Problems with Digital Playgrounds Privacy, Secrets, and Selfhood Censorship and Freedom of Expression Ownership, Authorship, and Copyright Commercial Content and Control The Digital Playground as Public Sphere Bibliography
Sara M. Grimes is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.
Reviews for Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children's Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games
The importance of play, and indeed, children's right to play, has been long recognised. Yet in practice, play is increasingly curtailed, controlled and contested, especially online. In her meticulously researched book, Grimes dissects how we reached such a problematic situation and, importantly, how we might move forward so as to enable children's playful possibilities in a digital world. - Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science With Digital Playgrounds, Sara Grimes deftly cuts through the often simplistic and sanctimonious rhetoric surrounding children's digital play-worlds to offer a compelling framework with which to understand the interwoven threads of technology, politics and culture that comprise children's connected play. The result is well-composed, invaluable resource for anyone seeking to grasp the complex intermingling of gaming industry interests, and technological affordances with children's virtual play practices, rights and creativity. - Daniel Thomas Cook, Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University Grimes takes a deep and important dive into the politics embedded in online playgrounds. This outstanding book is a must-read for privacy scholars, child-rights activists, and anyone interested in understanding how tech companies shape children's lives. - Valerie Steeves, Professor of Criminology, University of Ottawa
- Short-listed for Best Book Award of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the A 2022 (United States)
- Short-listed for Best Book Award of the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association 2022 (United States)
- Short-listed for Canadian Communication Association Gertrude J Robinson Book Award 2022 (Canada)
- Winner of Canadian Communication Association Gertrude J Robinson Book Award 2022 (Canada)
