Research on children’s videogame play has shifted focus to examine digital play experiences in a broader, postdigital context (see for example Marsh, 2019). Methodologically, much of this involves researchers listening and talking to children as an observer rather than as a participant.

My doctoral research with primary school children in northern England at an afterschool club considers how videogames such as Minecraft enable children to enact curatorship – a social literacy practice interweaving play and digital making and the construction of identities (Potter, 2012). Minecraft is a virtual worldbuilding game where players collect, mine and combine blocks of materials to build structures, tools and weapons as they explore a large virtual map. As a passionate videogame player myself, it felt appropriate – necessary even – to co-play alongside the children to explore this evolving and shifting practice. In this blog post I explain how choosing to play together brought challenges and surprises, and showed the importance of meaningfully connecting with participants over a shared passion, the need to be adaptable, and how being a teachable researcher can bring one closer to children’s experiences.

Connecting over a shared passion

Like all research with children, positionality matters. On the one hand, I was an outsider: a white British adult, not from the city, and a former teacher ‘leading’ the research with a group of children from a range of global majority backgrounds. While this researcher–participant power dynamic is typical – possibly unavoidable – I felt that our shared passion for videogames would provide some level ground. I talked to the children about this. I described my childhood gaming experiences on my Amstrad 6128 and about how gaming inspired play and writing, such as drawing walkthrough gaming maps to share with friends. I wanted to show the children I understood how gaming can be (and can remain) interwoven with our broader social and cultural lives.

Listening and adapting

Similarly, I saw co-playing as a way of getting to the children’s eye level; physically sitting with and among them, engaging in the same task as a way of listening, and being together as ‘gamers’. As we played, however, it became evident that my stance was framed by weak assumptions. For example, I had anticipated that children would be happy to join a shared map and build collaboratively from an agreed starting point. After all, that is how I like to play. Instead, the group quickly splintered into different sub-groups and alliances, the children choosing to set up and customise their own games. The trajectory I had imagined for my fieldwork had fallen apart in thirty minutes.

‘The group quickly splintered into different sub-groups and alliances, the children choosing to set up and customise their own games.’

What ‘playing Minecraft’ meant to me – a 43-year-old researcher – was not what it meant to the children. While I built cautiously and methodically, the children preferred combat and rapid cycles of construction and destruction, hopping between games and groups. It was as if I was a different species of gamer co-existing alongside them – slower, more self-conscious, more boring. It wasn’t enough to be physically at their eye level; I needed to be there experientially.

Figure 1: A cave house built by Stefan during the Minecraft club. Slow, careful building was very different to the way the children liked to play and revealed more about how children purpose videogames.

Learning to be teachable

This required me to quieten my anxieties about performing as a researcher and instead try to get closer to how they experienced the game. So, instead, I asked the children to teach me how to play Minecraft their way. And they did so with enthusiasm and patience. I was shown the best way to prepare for a quest, taken to fight the fearsome Ender Dragon (I was only permitted to watch…) and shared moments of genuine wonder as we explored underground caves together. This subtle but meaningful shift moved the focus away from me ‘doing research’ and created opportunity for the children to reveal more fully how they saw Minecraft intersecting with their lives. What emerged was how knowledge, expertise and memory was woven into their play: childhoods in Pakistan; thoughts on Gaza, football, Ramadan, Barbie; their knowledge of growing plants, glassmaking and caring for animals; their dreams for their future.

This too shifted my understanding of children’s curatorship beyond representational meaning-making – such as what can be built and collected in Minecraft – and towards spatial and temporal trajectories, the felt experience of gaming and how children use virtual playspaces to make and remake meaning of the world. This only emerged by me taking a step back.

This experience reminded me of the need to approach children with humility, to recognise where their expertise outstrips mine, and, above all, to remain teachable. None of which comes easily to a former teacher. Tellingly, perhaps, it also represented a rare experience for the participants. But getting to the children’s eye level both physically and experientially can help us to renew our thinking about participatory research, and to appreciate more fully how children navigate a complex and uncertain world.

References

Marsh, J., (2019). Researching young children’s play in the post-digital age: Questions of method. In O. Erstad, R. Flewitt, B. Kümmerling-Meibauer, et al. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of learning with technology in early childhood (pp 157-169). Routledge.

Potter, J. (2012). Digital media and learner identity: The new curatorship. Palgrave Macmillan.