The Child in Videogames : From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous / / Emma Reay

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910760290403321
• Autore: Reay Emma
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cham, Switzerland : , : Springer Nature Switzerland AG, , [2024]; ©2024
• ISBN: 9783031423710; 9783031423703
• Edizione: [First edition.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (229 pages) : illustrations
• Disciplina: 794.8
• Soggetti: Video games - Literary themes, motives; Children in mass media; Video games and children
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- 1 Dreaming the Myth Onwards -- A Seat at the Kid's Table -- Childish Violence and Violent Children -- Adult Joy -- Destabilising Age-Based Identities -- Chapter Overview -- References -- 2 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 NPCs -- Death -- Child-Antagonists -- A Shared Shorthand -- Approaches to Generating Taxonomies of Child-Characters -- Laying Bare the Faults -- Critical Ekphrasis -- References -- 3 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 -- References -- 4 Child-Killers and Killer-Children -- Agency and Eeriness -- Little Monsters -- Authority and Autonomy -- The Waif as an Indecipherable Cipher -- Who Won? -- Stereotyping as Conditioning -- References -- 5 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 -- References -- 6 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 -- References -- 7 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 -- References -- 8 Conclusion -- References -- Index.
• Sommario/riassunto: Drawing 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.