Children's Games in the New Media Age. Child Lore, Media and the PlaygroundBy AndrewBurn and ChrisRichards (eds) Surrey: Ashgate, 2014 ISBN: 978‐1‐4094‐5025‐2 (Pbk), 224 pp

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

The book consists of eight chapters based on the project ‘Children's playground games and songs in the new media age’, focusing on the relationship between children's traditional play cultures and their media-based play. It relates to the pioneering work on children's play by Iona and Peter Opie. The contributors share the idea that childhood is a stage in the life course and a generational category, and that children are seen as competent actors used as both informants and co-researchers. In addition, four aspects of play frame the chapters: the changing landscape of play, cultural rehearsal, ludic bricolage and heterotopian games (Burn, Chapter one). Several of the chapters discuss how media are important frames of references with regard to continuity and change in children's play and game practices. Drawing on the Opie's work and revisiting their data, children's play can be seen as phenomena that both remain the same and change, particularly with regard to cultural artefacts that are available and used as resources. The historical perspective is, in particular, made visible through a close-up analysis of examples from Opie's recordings (Jobson et al. in Chapter two), but also Richard's work on rough play is presented as a historical phenomenon (Chapter four). Drawing on children's perspectives, it is illustrated that children playing rough games are not to be seen as a particular interest in violence or roughness as such, rather that the children see this as an essential part of what they are playing. The playfulness in the children's way of dealing with play and games, adapting them to the here and now, is described as ludic bricolage. Bishop (Chapter three) shows how clapping games are learnt not merely in face-to-face interaction, but also by watching the game on media such as YouTube. In addition, she looks at the consequences on how clapping games are performed in children's culture. Bishop's study of clapping games is a good illustration of cultural rehearsal in the playground in a changing media landscape. In Chapter five, Marsh investigates social aspects of children's online and offline play. She lets us know that children's friendship moves across online and offline spaces. Her analysis also tells that children seem to be more active when they decide upon who they want to play with or not in online games and play, and that their online networks seem to be more diverse than their offline networks. The role of media in play does not only concern learning and social networks. What may be even more striking is media references in play and games. A well-known phenomenon that has been studied in play and games is how life ‘outside’ slips into the activity. In Willet's exploration of how media references are integrated in children's play in the playground, she shows how elements from popular culture (moves, digital games, etc.) are remixed, re-contextualised and adapted to work in the local play activity (Chapter 6). She claims that what characterises remixed culture is performativity, proximity and originality, and that children are always interpreting texts and practices in their play. The last two chapters in the book access children's relation to play and games from a design theoretical view combined with participatory research. Mitchel presents ‘The Game Catcher’, which is both a research tool developed for the study of embodied movement in 3D and a computer game. Mitchel shows how the game designers, together with the participating children, turn clapping games in the playground into computer games. The chapter is a description of how children are made participants in research and development projects. In Chapter eight, Potter directs focus on how children participated in the development of a website for the British library that displayed selections from the Opie's archive together with the video-recordings of play in the project. Using the concept of curating, Potter makes visible how children are media literate, being active in collecting, cataloguing, arranging and assembling for exhibition and displaying material on the webpage by the use of different media resources. This book makes an important contribution to the scholars' understanding of children and play in contemporary society. It is nuanced and fascinating in its analyses of how digital media are integrated into children's play and games practices in the playground. However, I would also have liked to see a substantial discussion of research on children's play and gaming in action. Even though the authors have been working with participant observation and video-recordings, the chapters are still mainly based on interviews with the children. Indeed, I would prefer close-up analysis of how transmission, transformation, cultural rehearsal and curatorship are achieved in and across time and place in children's everyday lives.