Risky Play and Paratextual Overflow: At the Intersection of Streaming and Mobile Games

This presentation will explore the increasingly porous boundaries of children’s online games and consider some of the implications for paratextual play at the intersection of mobile games and streaming practices. Videogames are integrally part of broader digital cultures across a complex network of social media, streaming and content-sharing platforms including Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and a range of online chat and in-game forums. These playful media ecologies constellate around popular games, enacted and “stitched together” through online affinity spaces. For pre-teen and tween children, the positive effects of paratextual or “extrinsic” play on and through streaming platforms are significant, as they become sites for rich sociality, creative and social capital, identity performance, community and belonging. Yet there are also significant risks involved, as these spaces are often occupied by adults and provide unmoderated exposure or access to age-inappropriate content and behaviour. Using the examples of Minecraft and Fortnite, Dr Richardson will argue that the risks (negative effects) and enablements (positive effects) are deeply entangled in children’s play practices, and pervaded by broader critical issues relating to web literacy and online toxicity.

Ingrid Richardson is Professor of Digital Media in the School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. She has a broad interest in the human-technology relation and has published widely on the phenomenology of games and mobile media, digital ethnography and innovative research methods, the relation between technology use and well-being, children's mobile media practices, and the cultural effects of urban screens, wearable technologies, augmented reality, and web-based content creation and distribution. Recent co-authored books include: Ambient Play (MIT Press, 2020), Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity (Palgrave, 2020), Understanding Games and Game Cultures (Sage, 2021), Bodies and Mobile Media (Polity Press, 2023), and Mobile Media and the Urban Night (Palgrave, forthcoming).

This event is being held as part of RMIT University's Social Change Symposium and What is Children's Content in the Streaming Era? Issues, Tensions, Controversies, an initiative of the RMIT-based Streaming Industries & Genre Network, supported by the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform.