Digital Playgrounds
Sara Grimes
Embedded Files
Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children's Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games
May 25, 2022 at 2-3.30 PM, EST
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Biography
Dr. Sara M. Grimes is Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) and Semaphore Labs and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching are centred in the areas of children’s digital media culture(s) and critical theories of technology, with a focus on digital games. Her published work explores the commercialization of children’s play culture and creative expression, discussions of intellectual property and fair dealing in child-specific digital environments, as well as the legal and ethical dimensions of marketing to children online. Her new book, Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children’s Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games, was published by the University of Toronto Press in August 2021. Community outreach is a core part of Dr. Grimes’s professional practice, and she regularly speaks at media/cultural industry conferences, participates in policy consultations, and engages in action research projects and cross-sector partnerships. Recently, Professor Grimes was awarded a three-year SSHRC Insight Grant to lead a new trans-national, cross-sector research collaboration entitled Children and Age-Appropriate Game Design: Children’s and Developers’ Experiences of How Digital Games are Classified, Rated and Designed for Children. This project will revisit how children’s games are regulated in both Canada and the UK, particularly around questions of children’s privacy and other rights, and the ethics of in-game advertising and monetization.
Sara Grimes, Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) and Semaphore Labs and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.
About the Talk
Digital games and online play spaces can provide children with extremely valuable tools for collaborating, creating, learning, and having fun. Digital games can provide unique forums where kids can exercise their agency and engage in a meaningful shared cultural experience. In many cases, however, this potential is diminished by the prioritization of commercialization and the enrollment of child users into big data economies. In this talk, I present four tendencies that dominate and shape the child-specific commercial digital play landscape: a deep disconnect between hegemonic articulations of children’s privacy and children’s need for autonomous spaces and interactions; a lack of support for children’s freedom of expression online and its positioning in opposition to children’s “safety”; unanswered questions about who owns children’s digital content and shared culture; and the problematic application of both traditional and emerging models of corporate control, monetization, and commercialization to artifacts designed and targeted to young children. The prevalence of these tendencies has profound implications for children’s digital play, sense of “self” (identities), and rights. I argue that the concretization of these tendencies as design features and quasi-legal “rules of play” highlights the urgent need for a cross-sector collaboration aimed at better supporting children's rights and interests in connected play environments.
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