The Child in Videogames

Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, this book redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. The Child in Videogames is remarkable. Its ground-breaking approach to scholarship on videogames and, more broadly, textual representations of children stands to transform how both are studied. Its brilliant analysis of the childly and childness across videogames designed for both younger and mature players will shape thinking—both academic and industry, I believe—for years to come. --Professor Gretchen Papazian, Central Michigan University, USA Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, this book redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and education research - child-characters in videogames are all but invisible. This book's aim is to make these child-characters not only visible, but legible, and to demonstrate that coded kids in virtual worlds can shed light on how and why the boundaries between adults and children are shifting. Dr. Emma Reay is a Senior Lecturer in Emerging Media at the University of Southampton.