Abstract
Play is typically conceptualised as a cornerstone of well-being in early childhood and as an intuitive means of fulfilling social, emotional and physical needs. As a result, the darker sides of play and playfulness can remain neglected and undertheorised, and become invisiblised from debates (Grieshaber and McArdle, 2010). Despite Sutton-Smith’s (2009) comments on the potentials for play to involve instances of negative affect, and more recent research on aggression and loss in the context of early childhood play and experience (Madrid, 2013; Silin, 2013), these are often pushed beyond the theoretical and discursive parameters of play and left unconsidered. In this way, presentations of play as only ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ contribute to the limiting, final vocabulary (Hawkins, 2002; Rorty, 1995) and mythic speech (Barthes, 1972; McClure, 2011) that surround children and childhood, and further reinforce ideas about childhood innocence (Robinson, 2013). In this special issue, a rich collection of articles extends and expands theorisations of play to bring darker aspects to the fore. Collectively, the articles examine children’s use of play to explore negative affect and difficult circumstances, and go on to question how and why children’s play, particularly that which is in some sense dark, is often so deeply unsettling for adults. By attending to an exploration of digital playscapes, the articles also address the ways in which children co-construct, interrogate, disrupt and appropriate darker elements of popular culture through play.
This issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood responds to an urgent need to engage with the darker sides of play at a time when digital environments are opening up play experiences and territories that feel unfamiliar, and potentially even menacing, to adults. In this special issue, children’s play is conceptualised as unfolding in online and offline spaces, in what Burnett et al. (2014) describe as a physical-digital network of material and immaterial components. Research by Marsh and Bishop (2014) has done much to elucidate how children engage with play in a digital era, as they move through online and offline spaces. More recently, Lafton (2015) deployed Deleuzian theories to offer conceptualisations of digital technologies as agentive non-human actors in the making of childhoods. This special issue contributes to this emergent field of enquiry by examining ‘the dark’ physical-digital networks of children’s everyday play to challenge established ideas about how children do and should play, and expose a need for educators and parents (and the myriad others involved in the creation of digital resources) to continue to grapple with our conceptions of the child and contemporary childhoods.
The issue begins with an article from Carolyn Bjartveit and Lisa Panayotidis in which the authors recount pedagogical attempts to playfully disrupt and transform early childhood educators’ conceptions of children’s ‘dark play’, as provoked by contemporary popular culture. Embracing the imaginative potential of darkness and liminality, the authors invited students to problematise and expand their thinking about what constitutes children’s play scripts with a specific focus on fear, power and violence. Recognising that many educators are reluctant, and some even refuse, to allow children opportunities to engage in play centred on troubling social issues, the educators were invited to co-author a fantastical tale, inspired by the Disney film Frozen. This exercise was a core pedagogical device and incorporated course topics, classroom observations and personal childhood memories of ‘dark play’. Paley’s (2004) influential work about the relationship between storytelling and play, alongside Gadamer’s (2004) notion of Spiel, provided the stimulus for the fictional narrative exercise, whereupon the students entered self-made imaginary worlds. Here, the authors make use of the digital online platform to foster a virtual pedagogical space framed by creative writing and fantasy, in which theories about play and imagination were put to work through experiential and playful collaboration. The creation of an imaginary story, provoked by Frozen, enabled the participants to access alternative understandings of the nature of play, and recognise the ways that popular culture can strengthen children’s imaginative and abstract thinking, problem-solving skills and emotional development. The narrative experience provides a persuasive case for ‘dark play’ in early childhood contexts to initiate new ways of engaging with children about the complexity of the worlds of which they form a part.
Next, writing from the Norwegian context, Alicja Sadownik contextualises the dark sides of play from a cultural-historical perspective (Hedegaard, 2009), using Nancy Fraser’s theory of social justice based on concepts of recognition and redistribution. She offers a micro-ethnographic analysis of daily life in a kindergarten, paying specific attention to play situations between 2 five-year-old girls. The girls come from different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, but both attend the same kindergarten located in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in a large city in Norway. From a sociological perspective, the article asks difficult questions about increasing economic and, thereby, digital inequalities in a geopolitical context that is readily assumed to be based on egalitarian values and a classless demography. The author then turns attention to the institutional context to trouble the Norwegian kindergarten pedagogy of recognition and to reconsider children’s motives to redistribute (digital) goods within such contexts. Insights into play and daily routines within the kindergarten provide knowledge about institutional recognition practices that maintain existing inequalities, as well children’s motives that are anchored in the modus of redistribution.
The call for papers invited submissions in alternative genres, including literary artefacts, collaborative pieces and multimedia text. We were especially delighted to receive the submission from Jarod Roselló in response. In his submission, we are offered a series of metonymic moments, in the form of comic strips and writing, which provide the means to revisit lived experiences between the author-artist and his young daughter. Throughout, moments are loosely grouped around zombies, but also include conceptually or aesthetically related moments. In rendering these moments in the form of comic strips, he revisits, re-enters and re-experiences them. Engaging in a multilayered, interdisciplinary and affective project, the submission refuses to function as representation, analysis or interpretation of experiences, but rather operates as experiential and embodied sites. Through arts-based methods, the corporeal and affective are activated, and provide opportunities to consider and experience the moments in different ways. The comic strips and writing intermingle; the writing does not provide an explanation or contextualisation of the comic strips, but exists as a separate entity in conversation with, and moves within rather than following sequentially. Roselló describes his piece as ‘a project in divergence, an experiment in dispersing, in weaving between and among, in navigating a fragmented landscape’. Through wandering, he gathers found objects which provide a fresh and generative means to consider young children’s dark play in digital playscapes.
Rebecca Sinker, Mike Phillips and Victoria de Rijke undertake multidisciplinary analyses of Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency to expose the darkness lurking within, behind and through digital games specifically targeted at young children. Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency is one of a plethora of free online games specifically targeted at young girls. These games are densely populated with animated characters drawn from fairy tales, children’s toys and popular media, and typically invite the player to dress, preen and primp the characters. A subset of the games is preoccupied with pregnancy and shaped by a raft of cultural significations such as extreme makeovers, losing weight, dealing with cravings, hospital pregnancy checks, birthing (including caesarean), postnatal ironing, washing and baby care. Taking the online game Pregnant Rapunzel Emergency as an exemplar of a current digital trend, the authors explore the workings of ‘dark digital play’. They question what contemporary online games might tell us about the realities of dark play. Specifically, they seek to address the question: Is there dark play in the game itself, the observer or the player, in the maker or production? Working across three divergent perspectives – feminist mother, computer scientist and educationalist – the authors endeavour to offer interdisciplinary understandings of dark digital play.
Building on her previous work in this emergent field of interest, Youn Jung Huh writes from an ethnographic study of 4 three-year-old children and their families to explore spontaneity in digital game play in early childhood. The children were observed during their digital game activities, and their parents were interviewed about their child’s game play. Field notes, photography and video-taping were transcribed and analysed using Bakhtinian interpretative analysis. The analysis exposes various examples of young children breaking game boundaries (e.g. rule-breaking, using virtual space as a source of spontaneous play, navigating between virtual and physical space) in their digital game playing. Furthermore, the children created new forms of play by mixing their digital game play with other real-life play. Huh argues that digital games do not entirely change or displace other practices in early childhood, but young children’s digital game play is very closely related to their spontaneous play as it occurs in their everyday lives. The article concludes by arguing that young children are agentic and capable users of digital technologies, incorporating the digital world for their own purposes. The study demonstrates that young children’s play with media is a way of resisting the prevailing discourse that describes young children as weak and powerless. Through illustrative examples, Huh argues against claims that game playing is creating a generation of ‘isolated, pale skinned, teenage boys’ (Williams, 2005: 2). Such claims are overly simplistic and fail to acknowledge the ways in which (very young) children actively navigate between games and real worlds, and use social relationships to achieve their own goals.
The next article reports on a knowledge-exchange network project that aimed to inform the development of a video game for hospitalised children. The project brought together hospital play specialists, academics (including the author, Dylan Yamada-Rice) and representatives from the digital games industry to co-produce knowledge to inform the future production of such a game. Despite the substantial body of research that underlines the benefits of play to assist children to make sense of what is happening to them in ‘dark’ times, there is much less known about the sorts of games that could be designed to facilitate such play. The article describes a selection of the knowledge-exchange activities framed by art-and-design-based methods as a means of knowing through making. The article underlines the significance of materiality, creativity and working across disciplinary boundaries to recognise the affective charges that can usefully inform the development of digital spaces to address dark aspects of childhood shaped by hospitalisation and ill health. The methods generated knowledge about how to allow children to express emotions about illness and/or being in hospital; how to offer information about experiencing life in hospital; and how to develop a design that could cross physical and digital platforms with a space for open-ended child-directed play. As the overarching intention of the project was to generate knowledge across the stakeholders, the project concluded by materialising the core findings from the project into a paper prototype of a game on which a hypothetical digital-physical version could be based.
Attending to the cultural politics of emotion, Abigail Hackett and Lisa Proctor work with theories that foreground the agency of place and objects to analyse the entanglement of place, children and emotion (particularly fear) in play encounters. The authors argue that when children, objects and places come into play with each other, intensities and emotions emerge. Examples from two ethnographic studies in which play encounters between children and place seem to evoke fear are explored. They draw on Ahmed’s (2014) theorisations which stress that fear is bounded to place and experienced materially and bodily. Whilst fear is captured through digital recordings and observational field notes, within this article the authors resist a deep immersion in the digital, and instead attend to a careful interrogation of the significance of place and objects that work to evoke dark emotions. They argue that fear becomes entangled in the materiality of place and bodies, and emotions work to characterise and categorise bodies (human and non-human) in ways that connect to anthropocentric and colonial metanarratives. The authors consider the political implications of reconceptualising play encounters through new materialism, and argue for a need to keep the micro and macro connected.
Destructing, ruining, destroying, decimating, demolishing – acts not generally encouraged in early childhood contexts. The darkness of destruction is considered by Mona Sakr, who explores what happens to children’s paper-based and digital artwork. Drawing on sociocultural accounts of children’s art-making and social semiotic approaches to meaning-making, she argues that children’s acts of destruction might be understood as meaningful and points to the significance of different semiotic resources in shaping the meaning-making involved in destruction. Two episodes of art-making are subjected to detailed analysis: firstly, child–parent art-making resulting in a drawing on paper being scribbled over with a black crayon, and, secondly, a child using touch to cover over the drawing made on a classroom interactive whiteboard during free flow. The episodes are compared to explore how digital and paper-based semiotic resources impact differently on experiences of destruction, and the affective and relational work that it can achieve. A social semiotic exploration of destruction such as that offered by the author can move discussions of children’s art-making beyond developmental preoccupations with individualism and intentionality towards a post-developmental account of the richness of children’s experiences and actions.
Finally, the issue concludes with an article by Mark Coulson and Andrea Oskis which discusses the light and dark side of attachments and attachment style in physical and digital worlds. The authors contend that many games offer opportunities for the generation of new and meaningful attachments to both physical and digital others. Two ‘fundamental attachment errors’ are discussed to illustrate how these can lead to both ‘light’ outcomes, in terms of opportunities to learn more secure attachment patterns, and ‘dark’ outcomes, where existing dysfunctional behaviours become more pronounced. The authors argue that digital playscapes offer safer places where people can experiment with relationships. For example, avatars that children adopt online are taken up by the authors and highlighted for the important consequences in terms of psychosocial development, which is mediated through the degree to which the real self is differentiated from the avatar. Our sense of self is no longer limited to the actions carried out by our physical body, as we adopt other bodies, ethnicities, sexes and species, and our self changes as a function of what all these other bodies do. The authors propose that attachment is a key force in understanding play, and that studying its manifestations and effects in digital playscapes may contribute to understanding the effects of life online, and how insecure attachments may become secure. The authors conclude by arguing that attachment theory must become more malleable, and that digital playscapes could assist in that project of malleability.
The nine contributions that comprise this special issue offer rich and varied insights into children’s play by engaging with two undertheorised and interrelated aspects of play – the dark and the digital – and by bringing these facets of experience together. The issue gathers together a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, including digital informatics, new sociologies of childhood, psychoanalysis, social semiotics, and new materialist feminism and post-humanism. This collection bears testament to the many possibilities that are available to theorise and reach new understandings about the significance of new technologies and their manifestations in forms of hidden, taboo and monstrous play.