Description
Book SynopsisDrawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, this book redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and education research - child-characters in videogames are all but invisible. This book's aim is to make these child-characters not only visible, but legible, and to demonstrate that coded kids in virtual worlds can shed light on how and why the boundaries between adults and children are shifting.
Table of ContentsChapter One: Dreaming the Myth Onwards
- A Seat at the Kid’s Table
- Childish Violence and Violent Children
- Adult Joy
- Destabilising Age-Based Identities
- Chapter Overview
Chapter Two: A Survey of Child-Characters in Contemporary Videogames
- The Invisible Child
- The Invincible Child
- Playable Child-Characters
- Central, Supporting, Background
- Age, Race, Gender
- Supporting Child-Characters
- Death
- Child-Antagonists
- A Shared Shorthand
- Approaches to Generating a Taxonomies of Child-Characters
- Laying Bare the Faults
- Critical Ekphrasis
Chapter Three: The Child as a Social Construct
- Coded Kids
- Boy or Blob?
- History of The Child
- Who Thinks Beating a Child is Entertainment?
- Misogyny and Infantilisation
Chapter Four: Child Killers and Killer Children
- Agency and Eeriness
- Little Monsters
- Authority and Autonomy
- The Waif as an Indecipherable Cipher
- Who Won?
- Stereotyping as Conditioning
Chapter Five: Child Heroes
- An Unheroic Medium?
- The Spaces Between Oppositions
- It’s Dangerous to Go Alone
- The Child Hero
- An Inventory System Theory of Fiction
- Symbiotes and Parasites
Chapter Six: Plushies, Dollies, and Action Figurines
- Cuddly Code
- The Cute-Aggression Response
- Playgrounds of Cruelty
- Sensory Nostalgia as an Unscratchable Itch
- Spectral Nostalgia
- Intergenerational Bridges
- A Distant Someplace Else
- Childhood as a Magic Circle of Play
Chapter Seven: The Kid in the Fridge
- The Sacrificial Child
- Types of Child Death
- Affection, Anxiety, and Agency
- Violent Retribution and the Hardness of Masculinity
- Lights, Child Death, Action
- Damn You, Ubisoft
- The Case of Kassandra
