The Child in Videogames

ISBN-13: 9783031423703 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Emma Reay

Opis

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. 

Spis treści

Chapter One: Dreaming the Myth Onwards

-          A Seat at the Kid’s Table

-          Childish Violence and Violent Children

-          Adult Joy

-          Destabilising Age-Based Identities

-          Chapter Overview

 

Chapter Two: A Survey of Child-Characters in Contemporary Videogames

-          The Invisible Child

-          The Invincible Child

-          Playable Child-Characters

-          Central, Supporting, Background      

-          Age, Race, Gender

-          Supporting Child-Characters

-          Death

-          Child-Antagonists

-          A Shared Shorthand

-          Approaches to Generating a Taxonomies of Child-Characters

-          Laying Bare the Faults

-          Critical Ekphrasis

 

Chapter Three: The Child as a Social Construct

-          Coded Kids

-          Boy or Blob?

-          History of The Child

-          Who Thinks Beating a Child is Entertainment?

-          Misogyny and Infantilisation

 

Chapter Four: Child Killers and Killer Children

-          Agency and Eeriness

-          Little Monsters

-          Authority and Autonomy

-          The Waif as an Indecipherable Cipher

-          Who Won?

-          Stereotyping as Conditioning

 

Chapter Five: Child Heroes

-          An Unheroic Medium?

-          The Spaces Between Oppositions

-          It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

-          The Child Hero

-          An Inventory System Theory of Fiction

-          Symbiotes and Parasites

 

Chapter Six: Plushies, Dollies, and Action Figurines

-          Cuddly Code

-          The Cute-Aggression Response

-          Playgrounds of Cruelty

-          Sensory Nostalgia as an Unscratchable Itch

-          Spectral Nostalgia

-          Intergenerational Bridges

-          A Distant Someplace Else

-          Childhood as a Magic Circle of Play

 

Chapter Seven: The Kid in the Fridge

-          The Sacrificial Child

-          Types of Child Death

-          Affection, Anxiety, and Agency

-          Violent Retribution and the Hardness of Masculinity

-          Lights, Child Death, Action

-          Damn You, Ubisoft

-          The Case of Kassandra

O autorze

Dr. Emma Reay is a Senior Lecturer in Emerging Media at the University of Southampton.

Blurb

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.