Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Emma Reay, "The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Description: Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, Emma Reay's book The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and ed...