Below are some recent publications from members of Digital Girls. Please visit the Visuals section of our website to see our videos and other arts-based productions.
Paper presented at the Digital Games Research Association’s 2nd International Conference – Changing Views: Worlds in Play, June 16-20, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia.
Along with other scholars investigating children’s relationship with new media forms and technologies (Buckingham 2000, Flynn 2003, Ito 2004, Jenkins 1998, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002, Mc Namee 2000, Sefton-Green 1998, Walkerdine 1998), we wish to create an analytical space for the investigation of the role of video games in the mediation and production of kinds of postmodern childhood. Drawing on our ethnographic study of a small group of boys playing console games over several months, this paper argues against a view of digital game space in terms of disjunctive other, parallel or virtual worlds (e.g. Foucault’s heterotopias). Instead, we wish to propose a model of children’s play that acknowledges the hybrid, fluid and continuous nature of game spaces with the other social, imaginative and physical spaces the players may occupy.
Unobtrusive observations of the boys’ group play in the home provided key insights into the style and organization of video game play, while multiple depth interviews with the boys provided us with a greater sense of the boys perceptions the spatial elements of play. In situating our model of the boys experience of space we develop the argument following Henry Jenkins (1998) and Sara McNamee 2000) that video game play for these boys constitutes a childhood space in which the children perceived themselves to be relatively free from adult supervision. We also push this argument further by elaborating on both the collective and individual dimensions of this childhood space.
Further we have found that much of the debate over the fate of childhood turns around the issue of play and the social freedom that play represents. The idea that children’s spaces of play have disappeared through the intensification of adult anxiety, expectations, and supervision continues to resonate in an adult scholarly culture that remembers itself (however nostalgically) running wild though the playgrounds, back alleys, or fields of its childhood (Jenkins). Childhood in this sense has two important qualities. The first is freedom from adult supervision (and adult constraint) and the second is an association of that freedom with physical places that exist beyond the reach of direct adult control. We can see this in the sense (nostalgic or not) that schoolyards provide a modicum of freedom from the school, alleys and bedrooms provide freedom from the home, and even parks provide freedom from organized sports (in the Canadian context one could compare a game of shinny in a park to peewee league hockey at an ice rink). The fate of childhood then often comes down to the question of whether these two qualities of childhood have been lost.
As ethnographers, we are not as concerned however with an assessment of the objective conditions of childhood as we are with the perceptions of the children themselves. As problematic as the concept of freedom is in the social sciences it nevertheless is a concept deployed routinely and consistently by children in relation to perceived sources of control. With this in mind, our analytical inclination is to leave the fate of childhood (as the perception of freedom) up to the children. From this perspective, childhood is lost or in danger when children can no longer articulate a space that they feel is free from adult supervision and childhood is gained when those spaces can be collectively articulated by the children (and even adults) that constitute them. The benefit of this approach to the problem of childhood is that its avoids the trap of nostalgia since it no longer matters how we as adult scholars might choose to define free spaces of play.
Bibliography
* Buckingham, D. (2000) After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of the Electronic Media
* Flynn, B. (2003) Geography of the Digital Hearth
* Ito, M. (2004) Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes and Otaku
* Jenkins, H. (1998) ‘Complete Freedom of Movement’: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces
* Mc Namee, S. (2000) Heterotopia and Children’s Lives
* Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002) Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood
* Sefton-Green, J.and Buckingham, D. (1998) Digital Visions: Children’s ‘Creative Uses’ of Multimedia Technologies
* Walkerdine, V. (1998) Children in Cyberspace: A New Frontier
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