Virtual world games designed for children are a combination of social and gaming spaces, providing preteens with experiences that are often highly regulated through the design and monitoring of the spaces as well as being heavily promoted as safe and educational spaces for ‘tween’ users. As such, virtual world games constitute a site where discourses of children, media, and parenting are being constructed and reconstructed.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the articulation of the discourse of ‘good parenting’ in relation to virtual world game sites as found in popular press and on the websites themselves. Data for analysis consists of newspapers articles related to three case study virtual world games (Club Penguin, Poptropica, and Minecraft) as well as text from the sites. The analysis reveals the ways dominant discourse constructs ‘good parents’ as those who evaluate, select, and monitor children’s media access in order to minimize risks and to enhance learning opportunities.
Families are navigating confusing and contested territory when making decisions about online content for children. This article demonstrates that the territory is embedded with social and cultural hierarchies which are developing around digital technologies. By positioning virtual world games as both providing opportunities and addressing common concerns, the game sites and news articles analyzed here interpellate or ‘hail’ parents who are subjects of dominant discourses concerning good parenting. Parents who select and monitor these games are able to recognize themselves as good parents, and parents who allow children to go onto other sites are seen as less informed and discriminating. Further, the construction of other spaces as risky perpetuates and conflates concerns regarding high profile risks. I argue that these constructions align with earlier constructs of parenting and screen media and are adding to social and cultural hierarchies surrounding digital media.
About the presenterRebekah Willett
Dr Rebekah Willett is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has conducted research on children’s media cultures, focusing on issues of gender, play, literacy and learning. Her publications include work on playground games, amateur camcorder cultures, young people’s online activities and children’s story writing.