Abstract
In contrast to studies focusing on digital games as learning tools, this study shows how young children use digital games as a means of facilitating spontaneous play in their everyday lives. This article highlights how 4 three-year-old children’s play with digital games revealed their ability to create new forms of play by mixing their digital game play and other play in real life. In addition, this study shows various examples of young children breaking game boundaries (e.g. rule-breaking; using virtual space as a source for their spontaneous play; navigating between virtual and physical space for their play) in their digital game playing. This finding suggests 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. Young children are agentic and capable users of digital technologies, incorporating the digital world for their own purposes.
Introduction
This study is an ethnographic case study of 4 three-year-old children and their families, focusing on digital game play as a source of young children’s spontaneous free play, in which play is “controlled and directed by children and understood from the child’s perspective” in early childhood (Hewes, 2014: 280). In contrast to studies focusing on digital games as learning tools, this study shows how young children use digital games as a means of facilitating spontaneous play in their everyday lives. Using critical analysis, this study reveals how children’s play with digital games may be overlooked as merely child-constructed play in the midst of current discourses on play in our technological society.
With the rise in technological development worldwide, children are able to play games anywhere, anytime. Growing areas of game studies have reported that with the development of mobile technologies, children’s ways of interacting with digital technology have expanded (e.g. Rowsell, 2014; Tobin, 2013). Mobile and haptic technologies open up a variety of possibilities for game players to apply various strategies such as nomadic reading (non-linear reading), as opposed to linear reading and various methods of play depending on their own decisions and movements. According to Rowsell (2014), the nature of this action-oriented or ludic-based digital interface requires that the meaning of digital game play and the game space itself be redefined.
However, the meaning of children’s digital game play as a new type of play has been neither fully understood nor defined by researchers and educators; thus, young children’s digital game play remains at the forefront of most parents’ imaginations, creating extreme views which often involve viewing digital games either as ideal learning tools (e.g. Gros, 2007; Li et al., 2006) or as a cause of aggression and violent behavior (e.g. Anderson and Dill, 2000; Mitrofan et al., 2009; Provenzo, 1991), social isolation (Jackson et al., 2011), and threat to children’s physical play (Bremer, 2005).
Most studies on children and digital gaming (e.g. Gee, 2003; Oblinger, 2004; Prensky, 2001) have been faulted for failing to account for the complexity of the cultural and historical aspects that affect young children’s digital game play by only looking at digital game content and children’s consumption during their game play. According to Bakhtin (1981: 357–358), “the context surrounding represented speech plays a major role in creating the image of a language,” and this indicates that without understanding the context in which one’s action has occurred, we cannot understand how the specific speech is generated. This suggests that young children’s digital game play should not only be considered as a significant feature of contemporary life; it should also be studied in greater detail.
Following Bakhtin (1981), Tobin (2000) points to the importance of empirical studies of children and digital media as he criticizes ideological arguments that are made without real children in mind. He suggests that as we continue to examine the various types of children’s digital game play in different contexts, we may discover additional information that could help us to understand digital game play as a type of children’s spontaneous play, which is constructed by young children, allowing children to feel in control of their own play.
While Tobin (2000) warns that the digital game itself is never innocent or mutual, he argues that young children are not simply victims of digital game media. According to Tobin (2000), children are not passive consumers; rather, they recreate and play with what they consume whenever and wherever they want. Their actions, both verbal and non-verbal, which occur both in and outside of their digital game play, may or may not extend beyond the categories of young children’s play discussed by educators or child developmentalists, and therefore their various forms of digital game play are ignored or hidden in a “dark place.”
Linderoth and Mortensen (2015: 8) mention the dark side of digital games played by young children: “Children are often capable of coming up with politically incorrect uses of ‘safe’ children’s games themselves, which may or may not have negative effects on young children.” For example, children can use non-violent digital games, such as LEGO games, as a source of “destructive, sadistic, or rough- and-tumble-style play,” with their play occurring beyond the game scenario, which nobody can control but the game players (Linderoth and Mortensen, 2015: 8). According to Linderoth and Mortensen (2015), digital games are more like a toy that can be used in various ways depending on the players, which will, therefore, generate different outcomes. Because current video-game rating systems, such as PEGI (Pan European Game Information) or the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), are based on age categories and do not reflect individual differences in cognitive ability or values, these systems fail to protect young children from the negative effects of digital game play.
Therefore, the “danger” here is not the violent game content itself, but not knowing the various ways in which children might interact with such games. Wilson and Sicart (2010), in their study on abusive game design, point out that the game space is a fundamentally dialogic space that forms between the game designer and the game player. However, the conversation is not always pleasant; it can be “a kind of conversation that presents itself in the form of dare,” which may lead the players to put themselves in extreme situations (Wilson and Sicart, 2010: 40).
Marsh (2010: 36) suggests that researchers and educators examine the space more closely in order to understand what happens while young children play with such games, rather than “dismiss them as irrelevant, or deride them as potentially harmful environments.” In order to understand how digital games function as a type of play in young children’s lives, and before making decisions about the value of digital game play in early childhood, we must examine not only the game content, but also the various situations in which individual children use digital games for their play.
With awareness of this concern, this study attempts to answer, first, what happens while young children interact with digital games at home, and, second, how their game play is related to their spontaneous play by exploring the multi-formatted digital game play created by 4 three-year-old children. Using the case of these four children and Bakhtinian theory, this study will lead a discussion about digital game play structure as it is transformed by young players who are creative and active agents in their game play.
Theoretical frameworks
In this study, I attempt to understand children’s digital game play as a source of young children’s spontaneous play. In order to conceptualize this research question, I employed Huizinga’s (1949: 77) concept of the “magic circle,” Caillois’s (1961) characteristics of play, Sutton-Smith’s (2011) discourse of play, Marsh and Bishop’s (2013) three types of young children’s play using media content, and Vygotsky’s (1987) historical child to explore young children’s digital game play through existing frameworks, thus setting the stage for a new discussion on young children’s digital game play.
Huizinga’s definition of play, which emphasizes the importance of the time and space generated during game play, is one of the most important concepts in digital gaming studies. For Huizinga (1949: 77), play can be explained with the term “magic circle,” which is a sacred space that exists outside of ordinary life. Although his concept of the magic circle fails to explain contemporary mobile game play as a phenomenon that exists in the interstices of everyday life, his analysis does allow for the possibility that digital games can quickly and temporarily create a place within ordinary life through engagement with the imagination.
Caillois (1961: 43) defines play as a “free,” “separate,” “uncertain,” “unproductive,” “regulated,” and “fictive” activity. For him, methods of play, including game rules, are subject to change based on the players’ decisions. According to Caillois (1961: 13), games can “be placed on a continuum between two opposite poles”; one is
In order to explain the meaning of play, Sutton-Smith (2011) attempts to focus on the players’ emotional changes during their play, rather than defining the play by its characteristics. For him, play is not just a happy and fun activity, but also a serious exercise of our reality, which might be used to help us survive life in the society to which we belong. Young children often create their play narratives by utilizing media content. They use, exaggerate, distort, and even kill media characters in their play stories. With respect to this behavior, it is important to note that we cannot simply interpret their play to be the product of their imaginations, which occur outside of their reality. Rather, their play seems to be “heedless, more focused on having fun, more concerned with the realities that children face, realities that are important and even threatening to them” (Sutton-Smith, 2008: 101). In this respect, Sutton-Smith (2008: 112) sees current children’s play involving media content as “a means to habituate infants and young children to the high cognitive energy levels and the personal informalities increasingly valued in the modern, consumer-information-oriented world.”
Marsh and Bishop (2013) focus on how young children use media content for their play. Following Bishop and Curtis (2006), they explain three types of young children’s play using media content: “allusion,” “syncretism or hybridization,” and “mimesis” (Marsh and Bishop, 2013: 68). According to Marsh and Bishop (2013: 68), young children are not only able to imitate media characters (“allusion”) and use media content for their free play (“syncretism or hybridization”), but also creatively adopt “the original plots and characters in new and innovative ways” (“mimesis”) for their play in response to contemporary society. Marsh and Bishop conclude that the mobile and transformative digital media saturating young children’s lives blur the boundaries between young children’s media consumption and their free play, which makes it even more difficult to understand contemporary children’s play.
Therefore, in order to understand the true meaning of play, it is essential to include a study of the lives of the individual players who are actually involved in the moment of play, and who present all of the struggles, emotions, and feelings of the play being studied, as well as a study of the cultural context where the play takes place. From a sociocultural perspective, in order to understand today’s children’s game play, which is different from children’s play in the past, we need to examine the play of the “historical child” rather than that of the “eternal child” (Vygotsky, 1987: 91). This suggests that the concept of play might vary in time and space, and therefore should be understood within the moment that the play is constructed.
Research design
Ethnographic case study
This case study is one part of a larger study that explores 6 three-year-old children, who play digital games on a daily basis, and their families, who come from various sociocultural backgrounds (ethnicities, socio-economic status, religions, etc.) and live in California in the United States. I chose three-year-old children for my study because there have only been a few empirical studies of digital game play in children under the age of three (Liberman et al., 2009; Ostrov et al., 2006; Verenikina and Kervin, 2011).
However, finding a three-year-old child playing games regularly was very challenging for me. There were three main reasons for this: first, unlike four- and five-year-old children, many three-year-old children are still not in the early education system; second, their game play tends to be ignored or not considered as a regular activity by their parents; and third, many parents are not positive about the situation where an outsider comes into their home and observes their family life. I visited local preschools, children’s libraries, and a kids club to find three-year-old game players, but I could not find many children under the age of three. Also, the mothers of the three-year-old children whom I met in those places were not sure about their children’s game play, often saying: “Well, I am unsure if my son plays games. He plays with my phone, but I don’t think he can play games,” or “She has played Angry Birds [2009], but she doesn’t play every day.” Despite the fact that the directors of the local preschools with whom I met distributed my parental consent form to the parents of three-year-old children in the school, I did not receive any responses from the parents.
Therefore, I had to rely on my personal contacts to find participants for my study. I asked my local acquaintances that if they knew any mother who had a three-year-old child, would they be willing to arrange meetings with them. Then, I met these mothers and asked them if their child had any experience of playing any kind of digital games. There was only one mother who never allowed her child to play games; she prohibited any type of digital activity, including watching television. Some of the mothers answered that their child had gaming experience, but still most of the mothers were unsure about their children’s game play at the beginning of these conversations. For example, Lin’s mother asked for clarification by asking: “What games do you mean? I have some apps [applications] for her on my iPad, but I am not sure if they are games.” Amy’s mother told me that Amy plays
However, after I gave them specific examples of young children’s game play, such as mobile game play in public places, testing games in an electronics shop, and playing games with older children during visits to a friend’s house, they admitted that their child played games regularly. After our conversations, they showed a positive attitude toward my research by telling me about their concerns regarding their children’s digital activities, and helping me to find other three-year-old children who played games regularly. As a result, I was able to recruit six families for my study.
The cases
In this article, I specifically present four cases in which I describe each young child’s multi-formatted digital game play. All participants were given pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. Lin is the first child described in this article. Her parents are Asian immigrants who met and got married in the United States. Lin has a younger brother, Danny, who is six months old. After her mother, Hwa, had Danny, it was not easy for Lin to go outside, so she spends most of her time inside the house during the week. Lin usually plays digital games or watches media on Hwa’s iPad during the day. Recently, she has enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially videos introducing Japanese cooking toys) while she eats. This worries Hwa, but at the same time she does not want to stop Lin from watching the videos because it gives Hwa time to do other things around the house.
Chan is an Asian American. His parents, Eunsook and Minsoo, are Korean immigrants. Eunsook had Chan and Jun, Chan’s sister, who is seven, after she and her husband moved to the United States. Chan has his own room, but it is only used for sleeping. In the family room, there are Chan’s toys and a television. Chan can watch the television and play computer games with Eunsook’s laptop in this room. While Chan plays games or watches television, Eunsook does household chores.
Amy is a European American. Amy, Allison (her older sister), and Derick (her older brother) all have their own Nintendo DS sets. Amy spends most of her time with Allison playing “make believe” and watching Disney movies. Each child has their own room and television set. Derick joins them occasionally to watch movies and to play with their mother’s iPhone.
Mia has two siblings: Candace, age six, and Chris, age five. Jay, her father, is an African American, and Christine, her mother, is a European American. Mia lives with her siblings and her mother in an apartment. In their home, there are three bedrooms. Mia shares a room with Candace. In their room, there is a television and a bunk bed. Mia does not have her own game player, but she does share a Leapster Explorer with her siblings. Jay is a Christian singer. According to Christine, this has encouraged his children to enjoy dancing, singing, and listening to music. During my observations, I often saw Mia singing songs and dancing to music.
Methods
In order to understand how the three-year-old children play with digital games in their everyday lives, this study employs multiple methods: Bakhtinian interpretative analysis (Tobin, 2000), parent interviews, and participant-child observations and interviews.
In engaging with these methods, I observed each child for approximately 20 to 24 hours over the course of six weeks by shadowing their routines (e.g. playing with peers, visiting a friend’s home) and observing their digital game activities. All of my observations were documented through field notes, photography, and digital recordings. This study focuses on children’s ways of interacting with digital games. Therefore, it is essential to observe children and listen to the children’s voices while they play. Following Bakhtin (1990), every discourse should be studied in its situated reality. Therefore, for this study, participant observations and conversational interviews between the researcher and the children were used to co-create meaning.
In order to communicate with the children and to learn more about their thoughts, I utilized a “show and tell” approach. Unlike interacting with the parents of each child, I found it difficult to understand the meanings of the children’s facial expressions, since I did not have much in the way of previous knowledge about or experience with the children. With this in mind, the “show and tell” approach seemed to be the most suitable option for communicating with these subjects.
These approaches also helped to keep the interviews focused by introducing visual aids. I asked each child to show me something on a particular topic, using prompts such as: “What is your favorite game? Can you show it to me?” or “Do you want to show it to me? Can you show me how to play with it?” Then, I asked them to explain the objects that they showed me by asking questions such as: “What is this? Why do you like playing it?”
When the children displayed difficulty with talking to a stranger (in this case, me) or they resisted showing their room or objects, I would offer to show them my smartphone or iPad and allowed the children to play games with them. As we played together, even for a short time (usually about five minutes), the children would open their minds and begin to talk to me. In order to understand the children’s digital game play, I participated in their game play as both an onlooker and a co-player. As an onlooker, my role was to participate in their game without interrupting it. Like a gallery member at a golf tournament, I became a participant in the activity while also respecting the boundaries that protected the play from interruption. I cheered them on and asked questions about the strategies they were using and how they felt during the game play, being careful to respect their desire to not let my presence inhibit their play. I also played the role of co-player, by inviting the children to join me in playing a game that I introduced to them. This allowed me to observe how the children would enter a new digital game world. During this co-play, I helped them to play the game if they asked for help. If their family and friends wanted to be involved, I allowed it in the hope that it would help to maintain the atmosphere of everyday life and practice in the study. This was very helpful for me in my attempt to capture how children learn to play new games in their everyday lives. Furthermore, in order to understand the contexts in which the children would play and talk about their games, I held informal conversations with their parents, asking questions about the children and their thoughts on their children’s game play.
Bakhtinian interpretative analysis
In this study, I employed play theories as well as Bakhtinian theory as analytical tools for interpreting young children’s digital game play. First, I defined young children’s various play with digital games by using the play theories discussed above, and then I used Bakhtinian interpretative analysis developed by Joseph Tobin (2000) to analyze the young children’s digital game play. In his study, Tobin employed four Bakhtinian principles to understand young children’s talk about media. Bakhtinian theory is useful for understanding young children’s discourse because it allows us to pay attention to the utterances of young children, which may seem trivial and not to make sense, but become a clue for understanding our larger society (Huh, 2016; Tobin, 2000). Following Tobin (2000), I used Bakhtin’s four principles to analyze the children’s utterances.
Contextuality
In order to understand the meaning of an utterance, researchers need to understand the situation in which the utterance is made. In order to understand and interpret how children speak certain words, we need to include the physical (e.g. gaming space, game scene, daily routine) and social contexts (e.g. age, gender, sociocultural background) around them. For example, when considering why Chan chose to play a difficult game mode over an easy game mode, we need to look at how the game space, game scene, and his previous experiences affected him in making his decision.
Double-voiced or hybrid discourse
Every discourse is double-voiced. We directly or indirectly cite others’ words as we speak, but our utterances are nevertheless new because they combine the meanings of the other with our own intentions. In order to find the children’s own intentions from their spoken words, I looked at how they recreated the words instead of focusing on the literal meanings of the spoken words. For example, when I observed Amy play, she often invited me to join her play. She would take charge of our play by asking me to follow her “rule” to “pass the level.” She often said “This is how we win the game,” as she asked me to beat the eggs on cooking apps. Following Bakhtin (1981), this discourse is a type of double-voiced discourse, which allows us to contribute to interpreting the meaning of each word.
The words “winning,” “rules,” and “passing a level” are often found either within the game itself or in the game players’ discourse. When children play digital games, they often see the words “you win” on the screen. As Amy indirectly cited the game’s words, she was able to demonstrate instant power over her play. At this point in time, she became a game maker, controlling the whole game system as she created the game’s rules and gave commands to me. Perhaps she was merely attempting to catch my attention by using the game’s words, since she knew why I was visiting her home and observing her. I could not be certain of what her real intentions were by using these words, but I could see that she intentionally spoke and combined the words in an effort to control her play.
The content of psychic life is thoroughly ideological
On a wider scale, all of our behaviors and thoughts are affected by dominant ideology in society. Individuals internalize ideologies and discourse, and they often struggle with these. These individual struggles with the dominant ideology may serve as a clue for understanding the conflicts and tensions of the greater society (Huh, 2016; Tobin, 2000). In order to look for the struggles, tensions, and conflicts expressed by individual children, I attended not only to what was said by the children, but also to what remained unsaid in the children’s discourse – that which is referred to as the
Answerability
According to Bakhtin (1990), individual discourse and behaviors cannot be fully understood because of their contradictory and hybrid features. Nevertheless, it is important to find meanings from these and to question them because “we can see ourselves only through how we are reflected in others’ reactions to us” (Huh, 2016: 1046). In this study, I found four types of young children’s play with digital games as I deeply engaged in the play of the four children, whose characters both addressed and answered one another in interplay. Following Bakhtin, my interpretation/consumption of the children’s dialogic digital game play does not bring universal truth, but is ethnical because it allows people to “get outside their ideological assumptions as they experience the imagination” (Edmiston, 2007: 17). The four children invited various people into the construction of a discourse on young children’s digital game play by asking for answers to current children’s struggles with digital games, including the phenomenon of creating their own play by using digital game contents as a source of spontaneous play. Their experiences also raise questions about the dominant views on young digital game players, who are often described as victims of digital media.
Findings
In my study, I found many examples of children as young as three breaking game boundaries (e.g. rule-breaking; using the virtual space as a source for their spontaneous play; navigating between virtual and physical space for their play) in their game play. The three-year-old children broke rules mostly for the fun of it or to create another form of play. I found four different types of young children’s play with digital games.
Free play on a game system
In this type of game play, children play digital games but do not pursue the game’s goals. Instead, they use the game’s content as a context for play. Following Caillois (1961) and other game theorists (e.g. Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971; Salen and Zimmerman, 2004), I suggest that this is not quite a game, although it is playful. The young children’s actions during their game play are more closely related to free play than gaming because they do not follow rules or concern themselves with the formal structure of the game system. Instead, they use the digital game as a tool for creating new types of play.
For example, Lin liked to use her mother’s iPad to play Sprinkle Junior (2011). The goal of the game is to put out a fire in Sprinkle town. However, Lin was more focused on placing fireballs on a woman’s hand in the game than putting out fires with the hose. This was because she wanted to hear the woman’s screaming when she put the fireball in the woman’s hand, rather than finish the game. She ignored the game rules and even broke the rules. In that moment, her purpose in playing the game was to make the woman say “Ouch!” rather than to complete the level. Lin created a plot within the game that would result in more emotional excitement for herself. According to Fein (1995: 161): “Children’s knowledge of ordinary events may be important in their daily conduct but for storytelling or other narrative processes, it is their emotional meaning that makes events memorable and tellable.” Possibly, Lin’s emotional engagement with the game’s character who repeatedly shouted “Ouch!” might lead to her create another new type of play, also outside of the game’s original plot.
Chan also purposely failed on his game mission to make pirates get into a boat because he wanted to reach the point in the game where he could see the pirates fall into the water. Chan’s older sister tried to give him some advice on how to complete the mission, but Chan did not listen to her. Chan’s only concern was to get to that game scene. Chan’s intentions could also be seen in his choice of a difficult level instead of an easy one. I knew that he did not make this choice mistakenly because I observed that, although his sister asked him to change the game mode from “hard” to “easy,” he purposely chose the hard level. He understood that this would make it more difficult for him to finish the game, but he played the hard level because he knew that it would give him more playful experiences. This is another example of how young children’s emotional engagement with game characters leads them to create a new type of play.
Amy liked to find the blue bird in Angry Birds (2009). As she opened the game levels randomly from the game list, she searched for the blue bird. This is demonstrated in a conversation I had with Amy:
What do you want to play?
I want something else.
Not
My mommy lets me play, um …
Oh … a blue bird? Do you want a blue bird?
Yeah.
Let’s find it. Hum … it’s red [bird] … Go back [to the game list] and red. Yeah! This one … this one is the blue one.
Do you want to see something?
Do you like the blue bird?
[
Red … [
When I asked her if she wanted to play
Amy said: “My mommy lets me play, um …
The utterances of young children are often difficult for adults, including researchers, to fully understand because of their language limitations. However, this is not enough to explain my initial failure to understand Amy’s intentions. Vološinov (1973: 79), who is in the Bakhtinian circle, states that “[t]here are as many meanings of words as there are contexts to its usage,” and suggests that we look for both the linguistic meaning and the contextual meaning of a word. Without understanding the context of Amy’s utterances, it is difficult to understand her real intentions and the motive behind the conversation. This situation might make Amy frustrated and limit her play in a certain way, and I see the situation that limits young children’s ability to create new types of play as a hidden danger faced by young game players.
For Amy, the game system was only a tool for her play; her own idea of success in the game play was different. During my interview with Amy’s mother, she explained the meaning of winning for Amy: “She is obsessed with
Amy’s and Chan’s play with games can also be considered a double-voiced discourse, containing multiple voices that reveal conflicting perspectives between individuals and the larger society (Bakhtin, 1981). The way they act and play might not be totally new or their own because they still play within the game system and use the game words. However, as they internalize the official discourse of the game, their play becomes their own discourse, which gives them power to speak to or against the others (Bakhtin, 1981). Following Bakhtin, Tobin (2000) argues that young children’s play with media may actually be a way of resisting the discourse within media that describes young children as weak and powerless.
Sutton-Smith (2008: 115) views play as “a mutation” and “an amelioration of conflicts,” which allows players to experience and deal with conflicts without facing real danger. In other words, digital game play is a way of revealing conflicts that young children encounter in their everyday lives, and it helps them to deal with conflicts in reality as they challenge their counterpart (the game system or characters in a game) and locate themselves in various conflicting situations (resisting following the game’s rules) while playing. At this point, Amy’s and Chan’s play may serve as an example of young children’s resistance as individuals against the unwanted structure in reality by playing in their own ways within the existing game structure.
Turning non-game apps into games
In my study, I found that young children turn non-game apps into games, applying their own rules. For example, with one of the iPad cooking-simulation apps, Cake Pop Maker (2012), Amy created her own game rules. In her version of using the app, if someone beat the eggs on the app, someone else had to jump onto a bed. Amy used the word “game” to make me follow her rules for play.
This application does not meet most theorists’ definitions of a game (e.g. Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971; Caillois, 1961). It is very close to real life and far from a fictitious world, and it does not have any quantifiable outcomes or bounded rules to follow. It requires negotiating several steps, but they are more like instructions for cooking or assembling furniture. However, I see young children’s play with this and other non-game apps as game play in a broader sense. During their play, they used game terms such as “win the game,” “next level,” and “pass a level.” Moreover, they devised their own game rules. This is different from typical digital game play, where young players create the game context rather than entering into an existing game space with predetermined rules. The application becomes a game only at the point when it is used by Amy, for the moment it is played; this interpretation is supported by Vygotsky’s (1987) concept of the historical child. Amy’s action might be understood within the moment of her life in which various sociocultural contexts, including those of family, community, and the wider society, interact and intersect. If the app is used by others or at another time, it might not be a game, but a cooking-simulation program.
Game–free play hybrids
For Mia, dancing to music with her older sister was her favorite type of play in her everyday life. They danced to music that they heard on television shows and that they played on their Leapster Explorer. The music heard during game scene transitions and reset periods lasted long enough for them to change their mode of play from game playing to dancing. This is different from Amy’s type of play, because dancing to game music is not a rule to follow, but rather a spontaneous outbreak of play, closer to free play than a game. And yet, in the repetition of dancing each time the game music comes on, there is a game-like spirit. This type of play is referred to as a hybrid sort of play because, in this situation, the children did not leave their game play to play another game, but instead created play within the interstices of their typical game play. They were playing a game and playing without a game at the same time.
Sutton-Smith (2001: 166) calls “play a paradox or dialectic between order and disorder”; players are voluntarily in control to be able to “arrive at such a climax of disorder,” and the paradoxical position—being in control to be out of control—provides great pleasure for the players. When Mia danced to the game music, she was able to locate herself in a temporal free place, which was outside of the game rules boundary. However, Mia did not stop playing games to dance to the music. Rather, she kept playing games to have more dance time. For Mia, the repetition of being in control and being out of control was an important part of her play, and it might explain why young children create new types of play while they are still playing a game.
Another example of game–free play hybrids may be seen in Lin’s play habits. Among the many levels in
Mia and Lin played with various game contents while they were playing their games. Playing with game elements can also be found in many types of digital game play (e.g. intentionally crashing a car or wandering around while playing Grand Theft Auto, 1997). It is a meaningful activity for both game makers and game players because it helps game players to get to know the game rules, to have some sense of control over the game system, and to define themselves in the game space. However, it is hard to explain children’s play only by considering the game elements that intentionally make the game players participate in digressive play. The children’s focus (i.e. Lin and Mia, in this study) tended to be more for the sake of creating their own play by using the game system as a toy, rather than decoding the game maker’s intentions by testing the game elements. Furthermore, their play may or may not occur outside of the game boundaries, which is difficult to detect unless one pays close attention to their play. This makes young children’s digital game play, in some ways, hidden in an invisible place, and is evidence of what Linderoth and Mortensen (2015: 8) argue regarding the danger of not knowing young children’s “politically incorrect uses of ‘safe’ children’s games themselves.”
Lin caused the system to malfunction while making a cup of iced tea, which is a behavior that we can guess was not anticipated by the game maker and took the play beyond the typical game narrative. In Mia’s case, the game music is for the players’ amusement, not for dancing. Mia and Lin converted their games into toys by their own decisions and actions. Also, they created their own play narrative by using the game elements, which sometimes resulted in a plot that did not follow the original game narrative. Rather, the play tended to appear to be more related to their own interests (cooking and dancing) and life.
Their actions and approaches might look trivial or unsuccessful in changing the existing game structure or game rules, but the young children’s play narrative provides possible space for us to understand the meaning of young children’s play “from the standpoint of others” (Bakhtin, 1990: 15). Following a Bakhtinian ethics, the children addressed and answered not only myself, who was in the relationship with them in the moment of play, but also “a wider range of ‘others’” (Edmiston, 2010: 205). Their experiences give us new insight regarding young game players having agency in their game play; we have an obligation to respond to children’s actions and struggles with digital games, and we must find ways to answer the questions that arise as a result of such difficulties (Bakhtin, 1990).
Movie-like games
I found that the young children in my study very often changed their game experience from active play to watching the game as a movie. The computer game Team Umizoomi: Catch That Shape Bandit (n.d.) has one storyline but multiple missions to be completed. The story reminds me of the James Bond movie series in the sense that a main character catches a criminal running away by using various vehicles and devices. In order to catch the shape bandit, the child players need to complete their mission by building a vehicle using shapes on the game screen. In other words, the child players need to become like Q, who makes devices and special cars for Bond, and then like Bond, who drives the cars, rather than just watching Q and Bond in a movie theater. However, Chan liked to be a spectator, as he asked me to play for him instead of playing the game himself:
How can I help you?
Help me [
You can do it.
You can do it.
Do you want another game?
Do you want me to do it?
[
Why? You can do it.
You can do it.
Ok! Do you want to watch what I am playing?
Yes!
Ok! Click and go. Click, go … orange … go… click! What does this look like?
Wow! Helicopter [
[
Again? Why don’t you do it?
Ok. Which one do you want me to move? (Field notes from a conversation at Chan’s home)
After I completed the mission for him, he placed my hand on the keyboard to make me keep playing the game instead of him. He had played several games before this game, but he had never asked me to play the games with him or even help him pass levels on the games. My only role was as the observer. My position as a spectator continued until he had completed several missions on this specific game. This helped me to understand his actions. For Chan, at least in this moment, the game was not something to play, but something to watch. In order to find deeper meanings in a text, it is essential to attend not only to what is said, but also to what is left unsaid, what French literary theorists (Macherey, 1978) refer to as the
Unlike game immersion, which is experienced when players freely explore a game world (Poels et al., 2007), Chan’s engagement with the game was second-hand, and his game actions told me what to do. Moving my hand occurred outside of the game world. Chan’s case, in which he used my hand to achieve his own goal while playing digital games, disproves current digital game and social isolation discourse that describes game players as “isolated, pale skinned, teenage boys” (Williams, 2006: 229). Rather than isolating himself in a virtual space, Chan actively navigated between the game world and the real world, and used his social relationships to achieve his own goals.
While the game
Furthermore, watching games like a movie, as was found in the children’s play in this study, should be understood as a new type of play rather than passive media consumption. According to Marsh and Bishop (2013), in current society, the meaning of viewing has changed, and play and viewing are closely related and affect one another. For example, children watch YouTube game videos both for entertainment and for gaining game hints and tricks. At this point, Chan’s actions associated with watching games could be considered as play and, the act of responding to “current society’s needs or call” (Marsh and Bishop, 2013: 65).
Multiformed game play created by young children
This study shows that young children are agentic and capable users of digital technologies, incorporating the digital world for their own purposes. In this article, my focus has been on discussing the multiformed game play created or recreated by young children, rather than describing typical game activities occurring within a game space. This article attempts to understand how young children make digital games their own through their experiences with digital games, as it describes and examines the play context in which 4 three-year-old children’s digital game play occurred.
Bakhtin (1981) points out that one’s speech (words, actions) cannot exist in a social vacuum; it is affected by and interrelated with other speech and the social context in which the person is situated. This study shows that the three-year-old children’s digital game play is closely related to other types of play (e.g. free play, social play), and that they affect one another. Young children create various social and free play aspects by using digital game content as elements of a larger play narrative, and we cannot simply distinguish between game play and other types of play in early childhood (Marsh and Bishop, 2013).
Linderoth and Mortensen (2015) argue that young children are capable of using digital games for their own purposes, and this study supports their argument by showing how the three-year-old children used digital game content as a source of free play. In this study, I found that young children see digital games as toys to play with. They use the game content as tools to play with, and they create new forms of play by mixing their game play and other play in real life. Sometimes, they transform the game space, creating their own play space, which may include not only the digital game, but also dancing and jumping within a physical space (i.e. a bedroom or living room).
This study also shows that young children are able to tactically use and navigate both real and virtual spaces for their play. According to Tobin (2000), many arguments surrounding digital game play discourse that specifically focus on the effects of violent game media reveal the concern about young children not being able to distinguish between virtual spaces and reality. This fails to explain current children using digital media content as a source of their own free play. Tobin (2000: 29) argues that the fundamental problem of the discourse is that “it is characterized by a projection of vulnerability onto others,” which functions to limit our understanding of young children’s power in their digital game play, and takes away young children’s agency in their play. The young children in my study present a challenge to this discourse, as they show us that they deliberately bent or broke the game rules, and even recreated the game scenes for their own play.
These experiences are new types of play that adults have never experienced before, even with their old Gameboys. Nowadays, digital games allow players to create individualized and various practices during their game play (Rowsell, 2014). Therefore, the way that today’s young children play with digital games is something which we need to redefine. By only looking at digital game content and game media, or using existing gaming discourses, we might dismiss children using digital games as a means of enriching their spontaneous play, and fail to include them in current digital game and play discourses. Game systems do not explain young children’s emotional engagement with game characters; young children create new types of play from digital games that may or may not link to the games’ original purpose.
However, this digressive and unconventional game play in early childhood tends to be overlooked and discouraged by caregivers and educators, and results in the play being hidden and disappeared in early childhood. Hughes (2003: 31) points out that “interactive toys may encourage children to ask the wrong questions when playing with them. Instead of asking, ‘What can I do with this toy?’ the children may ask, ‘What does this toy do?’” This tendency to play with toys and games in conventional ways may become greater as children become older because, as young children get older, they become more accustomed to the valued practices of their community. This means that with digital game systems controlling young children’s game behaviors, our dominant views on young children’s digital game play might lead them to lose their agency in their game play. I observed Chan’s older sister trying to understand what a game was asking her to do rather than finding her own way to play with it, unlike Chan, who freely accepted or ignored the game rules according to his own motivation. This implies the need to rethink young children’s many forms of digital game play as a way of resisting dominant views about game play or escaping from the power of digital game media itself.
Obviously, digital games are distinct in comparison to traditional toys; they operate based on digital screens and require that players use different types of motor skills for play. While digital games have become a part of people’s everyday practices, they are not like any other everyday objects that exist primarily to facilitate people’s lives. Digital games are not neutral tools with meanings that have been predetermined by their users; they are double-voiced, containing certain meanings that require interpretation by the players (Bakhtin, 1990). In this study, the children showed how they made sense of the meanings by using the game words (e.g. “win the game,” “next level”) in their play. I do not suggest that digital games may serve as a substitute for traditional toys or everyday objects, or that digital or other games that have rules are not important for young children’s play. Instead, I argue that young children’s digital game play is very closely related to their spontaneous play as it occurs in their everyday lives, and that therefore we need to look at various young children’s game play as it occurs both in and outside of the game space in order to understand young children as meaning-makers and active game players.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.