Abstract
Anne Burke and Jackie Marsh (eds), Children’s virtual play worlds: culture, learning, and participation, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc: New York, 2013; 226 pp. ISBN 9781433118265, $36.00 (pbk)
Burke and Marsh’s edited volume Children’s Virtual Play Worlds: Culture, Learning, and Participation comprises 11 chapters, an introduction and an afterword describing various online spaces and media targeting children aged 4–12. Each chapter features an independent study conducted by a single researcher or research team. Although the chapters are not organized into sections by topic, the authors examine several of the same virtual worlds, such as Club Penguin and Stardoll, and they discuss similar themes related to identity construction, peer relationships, collaboration and consumerism. Burke and Marsh define a virtual world as, ‘a computer-based simulated environment that enables users to engage and interact through the use of on-screen characters (avatars) and chat facilities’ (p. 2). The authors collectively navigate the tensions between anxieties about children’s increasing participation in virtual worlds and the actual and potential benefits for children’s social and academic development. This volume provides in-depth and timely examinations of how children are now engaging in virtual play, highlighting both positive and negative outcomes.
Most of the studies are situated in out-school settings, although a few authors discuss the offline effects of children’s online behaviour in school. For example, Burke’s chapter examining two girls’ participation in the Stardoll virtual world shows how girls use online play to enhance offline relationships at school. Edwards’ chapter on post-industrial play examines ways to map the relationships between traditional and converged play so that teachers can include relevant play activities in the classroom. Several other chapters show powerful cases of children’s peer-mediated learning and digital literacy development. However, in order to appeal to educators, the authors could translate their findings into activities for the classroom, recommended virtual worlds that align with curricula and descriptions of developmental trajectories of children’s digital literacy practices in virtual worlds.
As Connelly points out in her chapter describing a cyberethnography of barbiegirls.com, anxiety about children’s outdoor play in urban spaces has contributed to the increase in children’s virtual play. Children’s engagement in virtual worlds creates opportunities for children to establish an online interaction order through peer mediation, the focus of Wohlwend and Kargin’s chapter on children’s participation in Club Penguin. The majority of the authors comment on how fluidly children traverse the boundaries between on- and offline spaces. Children are adept at navigating across these spaces as part of their everyday lives, according to Carrington, whose chapter draws on assemblage theory to describe how virtual worlds encourage children to engage with texts that are distributed across on- and offline technologies. Several authors in the book examine how site designers and marketing agencies facilitate fluidity across spaces by selling physical toys and artefacts associated with virtual worlds. In their chapter, May the force be with you, Pedersen and Rowsell discuss how Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer brain game draws on the Star Wars story world to create the ‘ethos of the game’ (p. 130). Many of the virtual worlds examined in the book draw on popular culture narratives to create an immersive experience for child participants with cultural and commercial implications. As Connelly warns readers in her chapter, the intertextuality woven into barbiegirls.com presents young girls with powerful messages about womanhood as defined by Westernized society. Discourses presented in virtual worlds influence children’s online identity construction with offline consequences.
Subrahmanyam’s chapter discusses the developmental implications of children’s participation in virtual worlds. Although Subrahmanyam’s literature review reveals a dearth of evidence for positive effects on academic learning, there is more documentation of how virtual worlds affect identity and social development. Research shows that fluidity between on- and offline spaces extends to children’s identity construction and social relationships. Children engage in identity exploration vis-à-vis their avatars; however, their online selves tend to mirror their real-world identities. Subrahmanyam makes the point that such mirroring has real-world implications for children’s safety. Although virtual play is an alternative to risky, unsupervised outdoor play, unfortunately, children face new dangers in virtual worlds. Children and adults must take action to safeguard children’s privacy. Marsh’s chapter on her survey, interview and observational study of children aged 5–11 shows how three focal children use different strategies to keep themselves safe online, including learning safety strategies from parents, teachers and website guidelines. Participants in Marsh’s study report that they are careful not to give out personal details in virtual worlds and manage their online relationships differently according to whether or not they also know the person offline.
How children manage on- and offline relationships also depends on their personal goals and identity construction. Burke’s chapter provides a more nuanced perspective of how children use sites for different reasons with different results. Jules and Chelsea, the case-study participants, are both immersed in the consumerist, fashion-oriented Stardoll virtual world. Chelsea uses the site to maintain offline relationships and interests, whereas Jules engages in virtual play as a way to gain online social capital and manage relationships that she struggles to maintain offline. Virtual playgrounds offer children the opportunity to make more friends around the world and to navigate the social orders of virtual play (Burke, Marsh and Subrahmanyam’s chapters). Burke examines how friendship, identity and consumerism are tied together as markers of girlhood on the Stardoll site. She argues that the site promotes stereotypically feminine ideals through constructed play. Burke highlights the tension in virtual worlds between creative and constrained identity construction: ‘While creating a sense of identity online, young people generally assume that they follow their own paths and have freedom of choices, unaware that they are engaged in a carefully directed virtual world, one colored by commercial imperatives’ (p. 56). Connelly’s chapter echoes Burke’s concerns in relation to her experiences with barbiegirls.com, asserting that the site designers aim to mould young players’ identities as consumers with corporate affinity. From her perspective, ‘virtual play is disguised as virtual socialisation clay’ (p. 116). Connelly shows how the site’s discourses, representations and intertextuality promote a cultural model of ‘consumerism, status differentials, and a value system based on buying power’ (p. 115).
Both these chapters emphasize that identity work in virtual worlds is gendered and driven by site designers’ commercial interests. However, the volume does not include an in-depth look at how sites target boys’ participation and promote stereotypical masculine identities through virtual play. Subrahmanyam mentions a study that found boys spend more time playing video games than girls. The author also briefly references consistent findings correlating playing violent video games with aggressiveness. Other studies include boys as case-study participants and Marsh’s chapter comments on Club Penguin’s gendered avatar clothing and games, but the analyses do not explore gendered practices and marketing with the same depth as Burke and Connelly. The lack of a male perspective to provide contrast limits the volume’s depth of examination of gendered issues in virtual worlds; however, collectively, the authors raise important issues that provide educators and parents with frames for understanding children’s differential participation in virtual worlds.
Although several chapters highlight the potentially negative impacts of children’s participation in virtual worlds, Marsh’s chapter, Reich, Korobkova, Black and Sumaroka’s chapter, and Meyer and Bittner’s chapter explore the potential affordances of virtual play. Reich et al.’s findings contradict popular anxieties around children’s media use. Although some have raised concerns that children’s increased participation in virtual worlds may be isolating and displace family time, Reich et al.’s chapter shows how virtual play mediates family interactions and supports scaffolded learning and new family connections. They explore the novice-expert relationships that develop among family members, most often between siblings, and observe that even younger family members take up expert roles in virtual worlds where they have more experience. Family members learn how to navigate virtual worlds through guided participation rather than direct instruction. Wohlwend and Kargin’s chapter examines similar patterns of learning, showing how peers mediate learning to navigate Club Penguin through demonstrations, copying another player’s action or suggestion, and watching another player to assess his/her understanding. They counter the notion that participation in virtual worlds is intuitive for children, who are considered ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001). Instead, they argue that children’s participation in Club Penguin reflects a nexus of practice and children’s knowledge accumulated through multiple and mediated interactions with the site. These chapters show how virtual worlds can facilitate collaborative learning through play and promote digital literacies. Marsh indicates that virtual, collaborative play has pedagogical potential and recommends that children be given opportunities for virtual playtime at school.
Meyer and Bittner’s chapter explores the potential affordances of virtual worlds for building sustainability literacy, “or the ability to critically analyze ecological problems at the human, social, and global scale” (p. 177). They explore connections between participation in virtual worlds and educational goals. Virtual worlds appeal to diverse audiences, are accessible, promote discovery-based learning and include simulation activities. Green virtual worlds, or sites with explicit environmental values orientation, could leverage these strengths to promote sustainability literacy. Meyer and Bittner posit that children’s participation in green virtual worlds may come to define what it means to be green for children. Unfortunately, they find few meaningful connections between sustainability literacy and the images and activities in the green virtual worlds they examine. One problem is that sites’ imagery portrays the natural world as static, and players cannot interact with nature in a dynamic way. The static portrayal limits the development of the kind of ‘systems thinking’ that is integral to the environmental pillar of sustainability literacy. Similarly, the games only involve surface-level references to green activities, such as composting or cleaning waste from the oceans. The in-world activities do not prompt players to consider how the waste got there or how environmental and economic systems need to change in order to prevent further damage. However, the deepest contradiction to sustainability literacy is that green sites’ activities, similar to the other sites examined in this book, are still geared to the accumulation of digital goods and status symbols. Although commercialism is the driver of many environmental problems, green virtual worlds operate with a consumerist ethos. Moreover, green sites offer memberships where players can pay to access exclusive activities and in-world status markers. Even though the money is given to green organizations to further sustainable practices in the real world, the in-world effect is the reproduction of a social hierarchy based on buying power. Based on their analysis of several green virtual worlds, the authors conclude that the sites they examine are engaging in ‘greenwashing’ (Athanasiou, 1996). Meyer and Bittner argue that, ‘The worlds fail to break from the procedural and discourse norms of other children’s virtual worlds, and thus, they perpetuate the hierarchical, consumer-driven focus of these spaces, but all within a green wrapper’ (p. 196). This chapter, which begins with a hopeful exploration of learning potential in virtual worlds, ends with an echo of other chapters’ findings related to consumerist enculturation.
All the authors point to the undercurrent of consumerist culture in children’s virtual worlds. Given this reality, children need to learn critical digital literacy skills, which is an area where educators can intervene. However, the authors of this book provide few strategies for teaching children how to become aware of the ways they are positioned as consumers in hierarchical systems in virtual worlds. Burke’s chapter indicates that although her study classroom included a unit on media and advertising, instruction did not consider the impact on children’s play in virtual worlds. Therefore, Jules and Chelsea have to interpret the biases and discourses on identity of the Stardoll site without explicit instruction for approaching these messages critically (Connelly’s chapter). Educating for critical digital literacy has to move well beyond showing children how to evaluate the reliability of online sources. Connelly asserts that children may need guidance to understand the implicit commercial manipulation present in virtual worlds. Connelly offers encouraging examples of ways that youth utilize commenting on site forums as a strategy to ‘talk back to the media’ (Jenkins, 1997: 32). Players on barbiegirls.com resist restrictions on non-subscription play by commenting on the site’s unfairness. They also subvert virtual world hierarchies by distributing V.I.P. screen names and codes to basic, non-subscription players. Youths exhibit agency as they practice resistance strategies in virtual worlds. Perhaps such strategies could become part of the education on digital critical literacy skills that Marsh calls for in her chapter.
Grimes’ chapter on sites’ terms of service agreements (TOS) provides a legal perspective on the commercial nature of children’s virtual worlds. TOS are legal contracts that bind players to site policies and manage player behaviour. However, in the United States and many other countries, minors cannot legally enter contracts. The TOS of children’s sites have found creative, if not entirely ethical, ways to manage this problem. Grimes conducts content and discourse analysis of 16 TOS contracts and finds that all of them reproduce the same patterns of discourse in TOS contracts with adult users. Many of them name the child’s parent as the agreeing party as a way to manage the legality issue. This raises new problems related to parental liability for children’s autonomous actions online. TOS contracts also address intellectual property rights. The TOSs reviewed require that children surrender their authorship rights to content they create while using the site. Corporate site owners’ exclusive right to child-generated content is almost exploitive in nature. Grimes calls into question whether or not children can even give informed consent to such terms given how inaccessible the language is in most TOSs. Grimes concludes that TOSs prioritize corporate interests and reproduce existing power differentials through children’s virtual play. Although Grimes does not specifically draw a connection between TOS awareness and digital critical literacy skills, this is clearly an important area for instruction. Children need to understand their legal rights as site users and develop a sense of intellectual property. Educators need ways to explain complex concepts and language to young children and provide examples of possible consequences. Given the importance of TOS contracts, it is surprising that only one chapter in this volume considers how they affect children’s participation in virtual worlds. Future education research should focus on TOS contracts as part of instruction on digital critical literacy.
The book provides a different perspective on digital inequity. Although concerns about the digital divide are well documented, they typically refer to differential access to technology tools and knowledge (Warschauer, 2004). This book gives a more nuanced understanding of what the digital divide looks like in children’s online lives. Several authors highlight inequities related to virtual worlds, but they do not highlight children from low-income backgrounds having limited access to technology as one of those inequities. Burke comments that she observed parents and children with the latest technology at community literacy meetings at her site school, where 80 per cent of children participate in the breakfast and lunch programme. In her chapter, issues of digital inequity exist in children’s differential access to the site based on their capacity to pay for a site subscription. Wohlwend and Kargin find that it is difficult for children to play together in the relational space of virtual worlds because there are few multiplayer activities. Children have to rely on physical out-of-school spaces to coordinate collaborative play in virtual worlds, limiting the possibilities of children’s virtual play. Several studies find similar problems related to coordinating avatars. Meyer and Bittner show how limits on virtual collaboration are ideologically problematic for ‘green’ sites whose mission is supposedly to promote systems thinking and working together. Collectively, this volume describes digital inequities that may not be traditionally considered as problems in the digital divide, but need to be addressed by educators and parents.
The chapters show how children’s increasing participation in virtual worlds facilitates learning about, collaboration in and development of digital literacy skills. The authors also raise important issues related to critical digital literacy and the consumerist ethos present in virtual worlds. Future work should examine clear strategies for teaching children how to recognize inequity in virtual worlds and act for digital social justice. Wohlwend and Kargin argue that virtual worlds need to change their consumerist ethos before they become integrated in schools. None of the chapters discuss virtual worlds that include ties to the curricula without commercial motives. The challenge remains for researchers, site designers, educators, parents and children to join forces and create virtual worlds that are educational, engaging and equitable. Although the evidence in this book would predict otherwise, I would still like to believe this is not an impossible task.