1. The Child in Videogames : From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous
- Author
-
Emma Reay and Emma Reay
- Subjects
- Video games and children, Children in mass media, Video games--Literary themes, motives
- Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2024