Gameworlds: Virtual Media and Children's Everyday Play

193 Pages·2014·1.673 MB·English

by  Seth Giddings

Gameworlds

Gameworlds
Virtual Media and Children’s
Everyday Play
Seth Giddings
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Seth Giddings, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6632-6
ePub: 978-1-6235-6802-3
ePDF: 978-1-6235-6389-9
Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
1 Virtual and Actual Worlds 17
2 Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play 35
3 Microethology: Methods for Studying Gameworlds 55
4 Media Worlds 67
5 Soft Worlds: Play with Computers 89
6 Play Grounds: The Material and Immaterial in Play 117
7 Real Worlds: Realities, Virtualities and the Protopolitics of Play 137
Bibliography 162
Index 175
Acknowledgements
This book is one material result of over a decade of interwoven academic
research and family life. The gameplay event that is described throughout was
recorded in 2002 when my children Jo and Alex were 4 and 3 years old. I was
working on my PhD with Martin Lister, collaborating on a book on new media
with him and our colleagues in the then School of Cultural Studies – Jon Dovey,
Kieran Kelly and Iain Hamilton Grant. With Jon and Helen W. Kennedy, I set up
the Play Research Group, which later welcomed Rune Klevjer, Hanna Wirman
and Patrick Crogan. These projects, and friends, all shaped and encouraged my
ideas and experiments. I have worked particularly closely with Helen – I thank
her for friendship, generosity and support.
The Lego Racers microethology was published in Growing Up Online: Young
People and Digital Technologies (2007), a book edited by the lovely Sandra Weber
and Shanly Dixon. I would like to thank them both for their early encouragement
of this work. Extracts from this chapter are reproduced by kind permission of
Palgrave Macmillan.
Parts of Chapter 5, ‘Soft Worlds’, are taken from ‘Events and collusions: A
glossary for the microethnography of videogame play’ published in Games and
Culture, and included here by permission of SAGE. Thanks to Rebekah Willett
for kindly sending me drafts of publications from the ‘Beyond Text: Playground
games and songs in the new media age’ project.
Many thanks to the young people (and their parents) who have kindly allowed
me to document and publish aspects of their childhood: Lily and Josie Wilshire,
Nico Hart and Sam Primarolo.
And, of course, Penny, Alex and Jo. Penny features only briefly in the accounts
of play here, but her love and care – and her prolific and phantasmagorical
imagination – infuses these little events and the flow of life in which they form.
I thank her for her patience with me as theorizing about play has removed me
almost entirely from its practice. Jo and Alex have been and continue to be a
source of delight, wonder and intense pride as well as data. I thank them deeply
for allowing me to study them, and for their permission to publish my findings
in this book. After all, as they pointed out with a shrug, no one they know will
read it.
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 The outdoor adventure of Pokémon 1
Figure I.2 Mapping a gameworld 4
Figure I.3 Constructing a Zook 11
Figure 1.1 The transduction of Lego Racers 17
Figure 1.2 Virtual and actual krakens 24
Figure 1.3 Tidal wave 25
Figure 1.4 Death games in Sandy Bay 30
Figure 2.1 Ugly giants, electric eels and shark-human-cats 37
Figure 4.1 Drawing Pokémon 81
Figure 4.2 Meta-cards 86
Figure 6.1 Prelude: Talking Star Wars 119
Figure 6.2 Sticks, swords and sabres 121
Figure 6.3 Hammocks and bean pods 129
Figure 6.4 Darth Maul stickers 133
Figure 7.1 Lego riot 141
Figure 7.2 Phantasmagoria 148

Introduction
A photograph from a family holiday. Two boys in a campsite, sitting close
together, but with their attention totally absorbed by the screens of the Nintendo
DS consoles in their hands. Framed by trees, they are huddled close to a metre-
high post and its electrical sockets, their consoles plugged in via cables, plugs
and adaptors, batteries charging after days of travelling without electrical hook-
up. They are playing, no doubt, a Pokémon game, lost in worlds that synthesize
pastoral exploration and adventure that simulate a community of human and
monstrous playmates and adversaries. For those anxious about the current state
of childhood, this might seem a dark irony – an idealized childhood of open
fields, woods and collective, imaginative play mocked in vivid colours, and an
impossible ecology of Viridian Forest and Five Isle Meadow (Figure I.1).
Figure I.1 The outdoor adventure of Pokémon