Connected Play ─ Tweens in a Virtual World

Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces asHabbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, constructavatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai andDeborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for theiroffline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds.

Play is fundamentally important for kids' development, but, Kafai and Fieldsargue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culturewith 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 andoverviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technologicalcompetencies; how kids learn to play well -- responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kidslearn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.

Deborah A. Fields is Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.