I am so excited to finally be able to say this: My book is out!!! After many delays (including two maternity leaves and two sick leaves) and multiple, much-needed updates to the analysis and literature, I finished the monograph I've been working on since my second year as a UofT professor. Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children’s Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games (2021, University of Toronto Press) is officially published and available for purchase wherever you buy academic books (well, maybe not WHEREVER, but you can get it through most major book sellers, as well as directly from the publisher's website). The back cover reviews/blurbs were amazing (read humbling), and I'm really hopeful the book will make some waves, or at the very least inspire some serious conversations about the importance, meaning and potential of digital play for children, and the need for us to pay closer attention to how digital play spaces are designed and managed.
The abstract for the book is available on the publisher websites (and all of the other book seller websites), so I thought I would use this space to share the list of unique features that I wrote for my editor when the book was still going through the publishing process. The tone is a bit braggy (as such things should be when trying to convince someone to put your book on their shelf), but provides my justification for why the book is important, and how it builds on/diverges from the existing literature.
• Digital Playgrounds is the first single-author book to examine children’s online play spaces across time and platforms. It provides a synthesis of multiple studies conducted over eighteen years, and grounds the analysis and discussion in the academic literature, policy/regulatory regimes, and cultural discourses as they have evolved over this same period.
• Digital Playgrounds contains a comparative and contextualized analysis of a range of connected digital games and play spaces designed and marketed to children (aged 6 to 12 years), and identifies dominant trends that have evolved in this space over time, and across shifting trends and rapidly changing technological forms.
• The majority of the academic literature on children and digital technologies is either focused on risk/harms or on educational outcomes. With some important exceptions, few books on the topic delve deeply into other aspects of children’s relationship with technology. Digital Playgrounds considers multiple dimensions of children’s digital play: as crucial forums for play, culture, civic engagement and well-being; as artifacts that contain a contentious set of cultural politics; as quasi-public spaces where important new relationships are forged between children, corporations, parents, and governments; and as a social phenomenon that raises a number of increasingly urgent policy issues.
• The original research described in this book is notable for its innovative, interdisciplinary methodology, which incorporates elements of historical analysis, critical analysis, design analysis, discourse analysis, semiotic analysis and an analytic adaptation of play testing.
• The theoretical framework is unique and robust, drawing on critical theories of technology, semiotic approaches to user-technology relations proposed by science and technology studies (STS), as well as concepts drawn from cultural politics, children’s cultural studies, new sociology of childhood, and critical communication studies. This inventive, interdisciplinary framework enables an examination of the very issues that have been most often overlooked in the existing literature, including questions about the ways in which social norms, assumptions, and expectations about children become embedded and reproduced within the design, contents, interface, packaging and management of the artifacts that adults make for them.
• Digital Playgrounds avoids both the celebratory and the condemnatory discourses that frequently dominate discussions about children and technology. It provides a comprehensive, historically and theoretically grounded analysis that acknowledges both the opportunities and the challenges associated with children’s connected games.
• Among published books on the topic of children and virtual worlds, connected games, and online play, the vast majority are focused on a single game or setting, and very few provide a comparative analysis across time or across gaming trends/technologies.
• The book ends with the identification of four specific problem areas in the design and management of commercial children’s digital playgrounds, and a call to action for creating a more equitable, child-centric, rights-based model for designing and regulating this space.
As mentioned on Twitter, I'm keen and available to do class visits, community events, talks, interviews about the book (and the research and issues it describes) over the 2021-2022 school year and beyond.
Thank you in advance to everyone who picks up a copy, checks it out of the library, or otherwise reads and engages with the book. This was a real milestone for me, and the culmination of so much hard work and sacrifice. That said, I truly loved writing it and hope to write another one soon.
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