How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities. Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds. Play is fundamentally important for kids' development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids' play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well-responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
MIT Press Ltd
ISBN-13
9780262019934
eBay Product ID (ePID)
182899991
Product Key Features
Subject Area
Multimedia, Experimental Psychology
Author
Yasmin B. Kafai, Deborah A. Fields
Publication Name
Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Publication Year
2013
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
216 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm
Item Weight
472g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Deborah A. Fields, Yasmin B. Kafai
Series Title
The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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