Abstract
Emma Reay tailors her book to bridge the gap between Games Studies and Children's Literature studies. Whilst she addresses her book to scholars and researchers in these fields, her case studies and argumentation can also be interesting in the fields of European media and communication particularly in the use of videogames as a form of media that communicates through texts, visuals, audio and rules. She examines how children and the constructions of childhood are depicted in videogames published between 2009 and 2019. Each chapter begins with what Reay coins as ‘critical ekphrasis’ which provides contextual information by the creation of a literary text to portray the aesthetic of the videogame. This is particularly useful for those who have not played the game and creates a setting of the scene before each chapter's critical arguments. In Reay's words, ‘The written record produced in response to a videogame is a remediation of that game, transformed by being filtered through a singular, subjective spatiotemporally specific experience’ (p. 51). Following her introductory Chapter 1, Chapter 2 outlines seven common tropes of child characters in the studied videogames and introduces this ‘critical ekphrasis’. Reay explores childhood, hierarchies and the role of the child in addressing ideologies and hierarchies (Chapter 3), intergenerational relationships through comparison of common tropes (Chapter 4), how ‘the child’ can offer an alternative to heroism within videogames (Chapter 5), ‘The Inner Child’ and nostalgia in videogames (Chapter 6) and the sacrificed child's role in highlighting the misogyny of the traditional male heroism (Chapter 7). Each chapter involves case studies of researched video games and explores the social roles made available to the child player through the establishing of childhood as a ‘conceptual category and conventional sign’ (p. 5).