
Connected Play
Tweens in a Virtual World
MIT Press
Published on 11. October 2013
Book
Hardback
216 pages
978-0-262-01993-4 (ISBN)
Description
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.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass.
United States
Publishing group
MIT Press Ltd
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Interest Age: From 18 years
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
29 figures, 1 table
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
472 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-262-01993-4 (9780262019934)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2013
MIT Press
€29.49
Available for download
Persons
Yasmin B. Kafai is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and lead editor of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming.
Deborah A. Fields is Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.
Deborah A. Fields is Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.
Author
Professor of Learning SciencesUniversity of Pennsylvania
Assistant ProfessorUtah State University
Foreword
Professor in Residence at the University of California Humanities Research Institute