Play Session II: Play worlds

The still nascent Play Research Group here at Brighton is thrilled to invite you to our second play session. This time we are considering play worlds from the perspective of children and young people and have again put together a really interesting line up.

Su Hepburn, Senior Learning Officer, Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove 

Works in a Museum, BlockBuilders, Minecrafters

Su Hepburn has worked with CYP in museums for over a decade. She focuses on the whole museum experience from the moment you’re handed the school trip letter down to what to wear, who to sit next to on the coach, what to pack for lunch and what to buy in the shop. Museums are a place of quiet, noise, people, emptiness, business, visual stimulation, reflection, warmth and atmosphere. They are places you can be alone, places you can be with friends, places you can be inspired, switched on, switched off. They are places to find your own stories and places to find nothing. Su encourages all visitors that museums aren’t just learning spaces (although that’s in her job description) but provide somewhere to pause and be mindful in our increasingly busy lives. In a recent project with BlockBuilders, we took the Booth Museum’s collection of water beetles out of the museum and into the world of Minecraft. The children were asked to imagine being the water beetle and to build a world suitable for it to habit and survive in. Role playing in this world allowed the children to use their scientific knowledge of the water beetle to build accurate habitats and to use their imaginations to build safe and secure environments.

Ewan Kirkland, University of Brighton

The Childness of Little Big Planet 

This paper examines the relationship between children, childhood, childness and Sony’s Little Big Planet series. Play, as an activity considered important for healthy development, as a non-serious and non-productive leisure pursuit, as a form of escapist pleasure set apart from the modern work world, is seen as sharing many conceptual parallels with childhood as a construction of Western society. The idea of children’s media and culture is critically interrogated, and the notion of ‘childness’ introduced as a way of exploring texts with aspects of the child about them. This concept is applied to the aesthetics of LBP, its evocation of stop frame animation, sock puppets, cartoons and kids shows; the game’s emphasis on making, collecting and displaying; the tactility, physicality, photorealism, and ‘mousetrap mechanics’ of the game engine; and the narratives of colonialism, industrialisation, and uncanniness which inform the series’ various instalments.

Seth Giddings, Winchester School of Art, Southampton University

Ecologies and ethologies of virtual and actual play

Contemporary anxieties about childhood notwithstanding, outdoor play and imaginative play thrive today alongside, and inseparable from, digital media culture. Indeed, these are unhelpful distinctions that miss the profoundly ecological nature of children’s play culture. Drawing on my recent book Gameworlds: virtual media and children’s everyday play, this paper will outline some conceptual resources from the psychology and ethology of play, and explore their implications for describing play in children’s digital media culture. The notion of gameworlds is central, encompassing both the physical and imaginative spaces of play, and the media worlds they draw on and transform. I will explore three inter-related issues:

1. the strong continuities between outdoor play before and after digital media

2. the specificity of videogames and other virtual media as central to the nature and possibilities of outdoor imaginative play today

3. the relationships between the intangible resources of media imagery and collective imagination on the one hand and the material environments of play on the other

The paper will conclude with some suggestions for a ‘protopolitics’ of play: what interventions should adults – parents, teachers, and toy / game designers – make in children’s play?