CHI 2019 Paper CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK A Place to Play The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces Kathryn E. Ringland Department of Communication Studies Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA
[email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Play is the work of children—but access to play is not equal from child to child. Having access to a place to play Play is the work of children—but access to play is not is a challenge for marginalized children, such as children equal from child to child. This is true for children with 1 with disabilities. For autistic children, playing with other disabilities, including autistic children , where playing children in the physical world may be uncomfortable or with other children in the physical world may be uncom- even painful. Yet, having practice in the social skills play fortable or painful [51]. Yet, having practice social skills provides is essential for childhood development. In this play provides is essential for childhood development [26]. ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses One way to help autistic children gain access to play the sense of place and the digital embodied experience in a and socialization is through online spaces, such as social virtual world specifically to give autistic children access to media and virtual worlds [9,10,59]. This paper extends play with their peers. The contribution of this work is previous work in this area, by exploring the disabled em- twofold. First, I demonstrate how various physical and vir- bodied experience and how that affects access to play.