Architectures of Participation in Digital Play: Code, Norms, and Virtual Worlds for Youth Abstract

Tensions between empowerment and exploitation are never more heightened than when discussing the activities of children and youth online. While discourse in the mainstream press around youth participation in online spaces wavers between anxiety and hope, political economy analyses illuminate the corporate frameworks and marketing priorities structuring many of these sites (Chung & Grimes 2005). Yet little attention has been paid to the underlying architectures, of both code and social norms, that provide the foundation for the interactions of young technology users. If we understand code as law in the sense of the systems of the Internet regulating and providing boundaries around online participation (Lessig 2006), design becomes central to better understanding the constraints facing children in their online play. Code works in tandem with social norms in virtual spaces, creating very real architectures of control and surveillance (T.L. Taylor 2006).

This paper investigates how code and social norms constrain and enable particular forms of user participation, focusing in particular on gendered access to digital play and how digital game design is coded to appeal to what is understood as essentially feminine or masculine preferences.

Using data from interviews with twenty-five young people and their parents, this paper highlights how code and norms mutually constitute gendered expectations around technology use, and how users and their parents in turn reaffirm and reify these constraining and enabling norms through their practices.

Keywords youth; virtual worlds; gender; access; code; norms

1 Introduction

Ninety-three per cent of North American youth aged twelve to seventeen were active online in

2009 (Pew Internet and American Life Project 2009). The number of accounts in children’s virtual worlds has increased to a commensurate degree; K Zero indicates that 209 million accounts were registered to ten to fifteen year olds in 2008. These sites market themselves to parents with the promise of offering youth safe and bounded online play in an engaging digital setting, as well as the opportunity to explore large virtual spaces and share their creative content with other users, yet through strictly delimited means. From penguin avatars to colourful marketplaces, through game design, mechanics, and aesthetics, the code of these digital playgrounds works to attract children of both genders. As this paper will illustrate, this segmentation of content along gendered lines in online worlds works in tandem with the enactment of technological practices as gendered in the domestic sphere to create very real constraints around online access and participation for boys and girls.

Though Internet and video game technologies have a distinctly masculine origin in the military- industrial complex (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009), these origins neither determine nor explain a culture of hegemonic masculinity in digital play. Rather, it is through a network of factors, including marketing, design, production, labour, and preferences (Carr 2006), that a gendered vision of technological play is constituted. Using data from twenty-five semi-structured interviews with youth and their parents, this analysis highlights the ways in which gendered notions of digital play are co-constructed through the coding of design preferences in youth virtual worlds, and via the practices of young people and their parents around technological objects generally and online play in particular.

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In the first part of the paper, I summarize the current literature on code, architectures of control, and gendered access to technology within the context of youth digital play, highlighting the questions that prompted the qualitative analysis showcased here. This is followed by a review of the study methods, an exposition of initial findings, and an analysis. I will conclude with a consideration of future directions for research into youth participation online.

Code, Architectures of Control, and Youth Online

In the early days of Internet research, the focus on adult users and their behaviours, experiences, and practices meant that foundational studies of new media mobilization neglected young users

(Livingstone 2003). In recent years, however, academic and policy work in both North America and the U.K. have made great strides in considering the ways in which new media used by youth, from digital play to the Internet to ICTs, have reshaped and fuelled new social networks, a sense of global citizenship, creativity, civic engagement, and identity performance (Livingstone &

Haddon 2009; Ito 2008a; Kafai & Fields 2009; Buckingham 2007; Salen 2007). In terms of online worlds for youth, the economics of play have in particular taken the fore, as these sites often perpetuate an acquisition culture, profiting from immersive advertising (Grimes & Shade

2005) and dataveillance (Chung & Grimes 2005), and embodying a capitalist logic in the rules and goals of their games. Indeed, as with massively multiplayer online games for adult gamers, participation in the economy of the virtual world is often a central component of play. In the case of the popular virtual world Neopets, for example, economic activity is not just necessary for the purpose of maintaining your pet, but because such a tremendous emphasis is placed on exchange and acquisition in the game’s core activities, consumerism and exchange value are said to

3 constitute the entertainment and culture of the game. This kind of political economy analysis has been prevalent because, it is argued, the instructional nature of youth media makes the promotion of capitalist exchange value as the objective of youth play extremely problematic (Grimes &

Shade 2005). This aligns with Gee’s (2003) argument that video games can be highly effective pedagogical and literacy tools.

In structuring the activities of young users, code works as an architecture of control in the design of digital playgrounds, aligning with Lessig’s (2006) argument that commerce, along with the government, is central to the rendering of the Internet as a highly regulated space. The idea of architectures of control highlights the ways in which design is not neutral; in Lessig’s terms, code is law online. Code works to control by embodied values both substantively and structurally, in both software and hardware. This notion of designed code as value-laden architecture resonates with Grimes & Shade’s (2005) contention that, in addition to Neopets’s structural valuation of a capitalist logic, the site (and others like it) successfully differentiates and segments unique target demographics, particularly along gendered lines. The trend towards tailoring content to youth along gendered lines is not new; in constructions of children and youth, actual children are always implicated in classed, racialized, socially stratified, and gendered ways (Sefton-Green 1998). As a stage marked by turbulent meaning-making, involving a range of engagements with texts, technologies, and social environments, youth is also, importantly, a constructed stage loaded with the expectations, anxieties, and assumptions of adults. This is extended and embodied in various ways in the coded design for co-gender play in online realms.

4 When understood as embodying values, coding involves setting particular logics and asserting certain relationships, which can then be controlled. Thus, the role of designing according to certain notions of what girls like and what boys like works in tandem with normative notions of intelligible gender performance (Butler 1990) to reinscribe particular visions of ‘correct’ play.

The role of design as an architecture of control within this dynamic cannot be underestimated as

“technology constitutes the environment of the space, and it will give us a much wider range of control over how interactions work in that space than in real space” (Lessig 2006, p.15). In what follows, I will illuminate the discursive and material frameworks that impact gendered design for youth play realms.

Gendered Access to Online Play

Lessig (2006) notes that it was the pathologies of cyberspace, including viruses, spam, and identity theft, that led to a public understanding of regulation as necessary. The same might be said of the regulation through code on youth sites. Digital play has in the past few decades been the object of tremendous focus in both the popular media and academic research, and this issue grows more complex as the technological context of Western youth encompasses variously convergent devices and media, including televisions, mobile phones, mp3 players, and personal computers, all of which can be platforms for digital play, both online and offline. These artefacts and in particular their uses can represent unfamiliar territory to adults, and this unfamiliarity has resulted in a historical pattern of anxiety over emergent forms and their cultures, observable in the moral panics that spring up in a seemingly cyclical fashion around the texts and spaces of youth (McRobbie & Thornton 1995). Indeed, the question of maximizing opportunities while minimizing risk around kids online has become a central question:

5

Balancing empowerment and protection is crucial, since increasing online

access and use tends to increased online risks; conversely, strategies to

decrease risks can restrict children’s online opportunities, possibly

undermining children’s rights or restricting their learning to cope with a

degree of risk. (Livingstone & Haddon 2009, p.4).

Digital play has been the object of sustained focus in both the popular media and academic research since the release of the 1992 fighting game Mortal Kombat. Despite the lack of empirical evidence linking youth aggression to video games, discursively masculine play in particular is framed as a risky activity, as digital games are seen as propagating and teaching hyperviolent and hypersexual masculinities in their representations of men and women (Alloway

& Gilbert 1998). This moral panic, with its strong media effects message, circulates anxieties about gender, youth, and technologies, particularly about the state of young masculinity. This anxiety over deviant boys and their digital toys aligns with the discourse of “the death of childhood” that Buckingham (2000) identifies when examining mass media and popular press coverage of contemporary childhood. In this discourse, fears revolve around a perceived weakening of boundaries between childhood and adulthood, and a move into maturity that is seen as too soon. New media, according to this discourse, immerse children in symbolic environments that rob them of any agency and control, leading to dehumanization, weakened morals, and violent, destructive behaviour.

6 The other construction of childhood around digital technologies, according to Buckingham

(2000), is that of the “Electronic Generation,” where new media are seen as having a utopian potential for children, allowing them endless access to information, educational tools, and opportunities for creativity. What becomes apparent in the children’s culture literature is that these constructions tend to fall on gendered lines, with fears and anxieties around violence, deviance, and desensitization revolving around boys, and hopes of a better digital future oriented toward girls. Both constructions highlight and connect the mythologies of childhood and technology, and operate through a technologically determinist approach to new media and a media effects understanding of the agency of children. They also they tend to frame boyhood as a particularly troubled and problematic zone while positioning new media as utopian for the creative, social and educational possibilities they offer for girls.

In many ways, virtual worlds provide a salve to these adult anxieties, with sites like Club

Penguin, Whyville, Neopets, and Webkinz responding to the furor over video games with safely bounded hybrid media spaces that allow youth digital play, along with text-based communications, content creation, and social networking, with all the assurances of strictly delimited chat, content carefully designed to be appropriate for everybody, and the familiarity of branding provided by the likes of The Walt Disney Company.

The ways in which these websites respond to the concerns over video games as technologies of masculinity, and the reasons for responding to this in the first place, have their origins in a particular paradigm of childhood play. In this vision, the play of children is seen as needing to serve a higher purpose, with its value located in creative, personal, or educational development

7 (Narine & Grimes 2009). Play is not simply for leisure but purposeful, intended to lay the groundwork for the proper development of a productive adult. This is evinced in not only the channelling of funding towards digital games with educational content, but in the way in which the observation that more men than women (of any age) play games is correlated with low numbers of females in higher education and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Hughes 2008). This understanding of games as inherently masculine and of girls needing to be cultivated in the unlikely activity of gaming has contributed to the push for the design of girl-friendly games. These games are designed to appeal to female players, focusing on what is understood as attractive to feminine tastes, such as slow-paced, gentle, nurturing, collaborative play and aesthetics characterized by shades of blush and violet, known as Pink and

Purple games (Kafai et al. 2008). This notion of forming technologically-inclined girls through ultrafeminine graphics or girl-focused stories has been criticized for how it potentially ghettoizes young girls into delimited spaces of identification with traditional values, essentializing both boys and girls in how their preferences are determined in game code (Jenkins & Cassell 2008).

This vision of digital play as a masculine activity runs contrary to the Pew Internet & American

Life Project report (2008) that digital play is an activity shared across ninety-nine per cent of boys and ninety-four per cent of girls. Yet discursively the video game player is most commonly framed as a white, middle-class, technologically proficient, socially isolated, and violently- inclined masculine subject. Conceptualizations of gender thus are central to discussions of youth and digital play, particularly in how the culture and production of digital games constructs, produces, and excludes or includes certain participants, particularly via game content and mechanics. But focusing on changing content is quite simply textual determinism, and N. Taylor

8 (2006) argues that rather than changing content, we need to understand gendered gaming as about power asymmetries enacted in digital play. What needs to be considered is the masculine cultural capital of digital gaming, and how heterosexual masculinity is invested in the performance of technological mastery, resulting in the exclusion of female players (N. Taylor

2005). One way of doing this is to move away from examinations of content and gendered preferences in isolation from the spaces in which games are played and gender is enacted through bodily performances. In this way, digital games can be more fruitfully understood not as texts but as technologies.

Lessig (2006) notes that “too many miss how different architectures embed different values, and that only by selecting these different architectures- these different codes- can we establish and promote our values” (p.77). But what gender and game scholars have noted is that these values stem from a complex network of factors- including but not limited to a focus on protecting youth, promoting rationalistic values in play, and re-embedding essentialist feminine and masculine preferences into the design of technological playgrounds. In what follows, I will showcase a study in which I focused on the ways in which these values and norms worked in tandem with the coding of gendered preferences to shape access and experience within the domestic sphere.

Method

The study consisted of semi-structured interviews of twenty-five subjects, both youths (aged between eight and fifteen) and their parents (sometimes both, and the remaining divided equally between mothers and fathers). Subjects were elicited through a snowball sample in the central

9 and suburban areas of Toronto and Montreal, two major cities in Canada. These interviews were conducted in their homes, and questions revolved around practices of broader technology use in the domestic sphere as well as around practices around online and offline digital play in particular.

The profile of subjects was skewed towards the middle class, as this study was interested in domestic use of online technologies and thus required the subjects to be families with a computer and Internet access in the home. Subjects were also urban or suburban dwellers, and no rural families were included. These biases are acknowledged; this study is qualitative and does not make broad statements about youth technology use or parental monitoring of this. Rather, the object of the interviews was to give youth and their parents voice to some of the practices around technology use, surveillance, and gender in their homes. Indeed, upon the completion of interviews within this small pool of interview subjects, theoretical saturation was achieved. This is the gold standard of qualitative research, as it is “the point in analysis when all categories are well developed in terms of properties, dimensions, and variations. Further data gathering and analysis add little new to the conceptualization, though variations can always be discovered”

(Corbin & Strauss 2008, p. 263).

The interview questions were structured around the parallels between the hopeful and fearful rhetoric around youth play and understandings of technological play as inherently masculine.

Parents were thus questioned on their kids’ uses of technologies, their own general sentiments about youth, technology, and gender as it has been framed as a moral panic and/or social anxiety, and their own understanding of their child’s preferred technologies and their cultures.

10 In the interviews with young people, the first part of the interview consisted of a few basic questions on the interviewees’ preferred websites and regular Internet habits. The second part of the interview involved participant observation as they engaged with the sites and communities they mentioned. The third part of the youth interview consisted of more specific questions oriented towards the observed digital play, focusing on practices, interactions, avatars, and representations, particularly related to gender.

All interviewers were recorded with a voice recorder and a notepad, and all interview subjects have been anonymized, with coded documents used to protect all identifying information.

Findings & Discussion

From the twenty-five interviews, it quickly became apparent that the family can act as a significant node in the network of technological competence, enacting in various ways a gendered component not just in online gameplay but in uses of technology more broadly, including social networking sites, the Internet, cell phones, and portable music devices. Adult participants enacted gender in the household largely through expressions of maternal ignorance and paternal anxiety, whether this was the case in their home or not. Youth in turn enacted highly gendered visions of technology, framing feminine interests as largely social and emphasizing a masculine fascination with digital play. Participants also engaged in a particular form of black- boxing of their technologies, enacting in gendered ways the ability to go beyond the screen via activities such as hacking, illegal downloading, and creating content. These activities tended to be understood as something to be cultivated in sons and/or admired in fathers.

11 Notions of gendered preferences were enacted in complex ways. With only one exception, all of the young people interviewed, both male and female, participated in digital play, including a wide range of genres from virtual worlds like Club Penguin to networked first-person shooters like Halo. Many participants were sibling pairs, often brothers and sisters, with both playing many of the same games. However, despite the fact that within the everyday context both girls and boys were game players, the enactment of technological competence fell in line with discursively constituted stereotypes of masculine proficiency and feminine ineptitude. Girls that played fast-paced, violent games like Halo and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had their technological competence and non-normative gameplay enacted as exceptional (“she’s the only one”), inferior (“she still needs my help”, “I still pwn her”), and abnormal (“she has a boy brain”,

“she’s a tomboy”, “she’s not like other girls”). Feminine gameplay and technological competency more broadly were often rendered invisible or irrelevant, particularly when their play was limited to casual or stereotypical feminine gameplay (such as the play of Farmville,

Nintendogs, and The Sims), or when their technological competence was related to sociality, consumer activities, or word processing (such as texting, chatting, downloading via iTunes, and working in the Microsoft Office suite). Thus, within the space of the household, which we can understand as a primary gateway to technology use and learning for youths, we can see practices at play that work in line with essentialized design in the coding of virtual realms. Not only are games divided along the lines of casual and hardcore, but game players are also enacted along normative gender lines as expert and novice, and technological practices are enacted similarly as active and passive through the familiar pattern of feminine consumption and masculine production (Shade 2002).

12 Dovey & Kennedy (2006) posit that notions of digital play as the domain of boys produce a privileged set of play preferences and practices that are shaped by understandings of inherently masculine values, such as competition, aggression, and speed. This division is not only reflected in the dominant forms of gaming versus those generated in the pursuit of girl games, but in the implicitly gendered division of hardcore and casual gaming, where new categories are established for old patterns (Carr 2005). While it would be fallacious to assume that all hardcore gamers are male and all casual gamers are female, there is certainly derision, particularly in gaming paratexts like game magazines, websites, and advertising (Consalvo 2008), of casual gaming as an inferior form of gaming. This disdain is very important when we consider burgeoning terrains of play, not only virtual worlds but the Nintendo Wii, rhythm games, iPhone apps, Facebook mini-games, and puzzle games, which have opened access to gaming to more diverse audiences but are still disparaged in the hierarchy of gaming. This is why the deriding of casual games versus hardcore games can be seen as another way of ghettoizing feminine gameplay. The structure of casual games such as those on Pogo, from PopCap Games, in online communities for kids, or in the quickplay of console games, attract more female players because they are quick to pick up and learn, they do not require hundreds of hours of assiduous play, they often can be played on the move, and they allow players to log off quickly if work, childcare, or household tasks interfere. These gameplay features make these kinds of play, with their novel types of engagement, more attractive to the demographics that cannot sustain seeking a save point in 50+ hour games or learning the intricacies of successful World of Warcraft end gaming.

Thus, hierarchies of play can reinforce the understanding of video games as predominantly masculine tools and threaten the cultural intelligibility of femininity when women and girls attempt to play. Indeed, we can see a criticism particularly surrounding the Wii console games,

13 with the meme of the Wii Fit girl, a young woman hula hoping in her underwear filmed from behind for the viewing pleasure of the voyeuristic male gaze. This extends the trend of framing the females that do partake in gaming and gaming culture in public spaces as exotic and/or sexualized, as exemplified by booth babes, professional gaming leagues, and hypersexualized female avatars.

Indeed, the cultural intelligibility of masculine and feminine technology use extends beyond digital play. For instance, in the study parents were questioned about monitoring and surveillance of technology in the home. Their answers reflected how the regulation of technology use in the household was an interesting site for often reasserting masculine dominion over “all that stuff”- anti-virus software, consoles, computer system administration, cables and wires, etc. This was despite the fact that a great deal of the rule-setting around video game, TV, and computer time was determined and enforced by mothers. The relegation of gaming and computing technology in the household to masculine expertise, either husband or son, whether self- or externally imposed, spoke to the ways in which female participants enacted normative gender roles around technologies. Mothers also often spoke to the discourses of fear around games and online interactions more broadly, evoking the figures of the pedophile and the bully, and justifying the uses of “Nanny” programs, surveilled play, and a variety of other practices as an extension of their maternal protectiveness against dangers to the home. Indeed, many respondents were fellow academics that self-identified as feminists, were aware of the rhetoric around technology and feminine ignorance, and yet still they implemented policies in the household that structured technology as inherently dangerous. In this way we can see how technological proficiency and comfort is not just a discursive construct; it is perpetuated in concrete, situated ways through

14 local practices that reaffirm and circulate particular subject positions around gendered technological use, with rationales that cannot be separated from the discourses and designed codes that surround these practices. Thus these mothers not only grappled with their own multiple realities as “good mothers” and “feminists” (among many others), but they had to operate through the practices that were intelligible in and thus constitutive of their realities, and turn away from those that were unintelligible. This is very well demonstrated by the overwhelming popularity of the Wii console among those I interviewed, with mothers often speaking to the images of families playing together and a vision of their own participation in play

(which was never envisioned around the other leading consoles). Though their actual play did not always coincide with their hopeful dreams of family bonding when purchasing the system, what was interesting about the purchase of the Wii console was how the marketing around this device allowed for the position of mother as player to become intelligible, and how this led boys and men in the family to denigrate the system to a lesser status than their PS3s and Xbox 360s. In this way, particular subjects and objects are constituted as intelligible through a network of codes and norms, ranging from marketing to game design to discursive formations around video games.

Despite the marketing of party games to the family, including Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and many Wii games, which have been framed by advertising materials as easily used by non- traditional gamers, and which have made spaces of play more accessible, many participants spoke to these games as the exception. Within my study, when asked who played video games within the home, most participants, both parents and children alike, would neglect to include these games tailored at more diverse play within their categorizations of play. Video games were

15 still understood as of more interest to boys than girls, because of their “violence”, “gore”, and

“boy talk” (which refers to some of the aggressive trash talking that can occur in online games).

Thus, while advertising for the Nintendo DS and the Wii speak to family play, and challenge visions of solitary, stationary play, this play is still discursively and even materially (in the sense that girls and women in the home are not included in the play of other consoles) as not real digital play. This is interesting because in terms of production, Nintendo historically has differentiated itself from competitors by targeting other demographics rather than the “ideal gamer”, the eighteen to thirty-five year old male from a middle class background (Kline et al.

2005), thus deviating from the conventions of the industry to perhaps accrue a viable market in girls, women, and families. In response, it seems, the culture of video game players has responded by reifying a particular vision of “real” gaming, the hardcore gaming and casual gaming divide, where new categories are established for the older patterns of dividing girl games from boy games (Carr, 2005). Thus, hierarchies of play often reinforce the understanding of digital play as a predominantly masculine activity and threaten the cultural intelligibility of female players, directly in relation to the coded design of the sites of digital play.

The male consumer is thus still assumed in the production of mainstream, hardcore games, with gendered preferences perpetuated through a “series of inventions, trends, practices, and commercial decisions that have settled into a particular pattern” (Carr 2005, p.467). These patterns, as we have seen, work concurrently with social norms in the home, which can lead to differential access to digital play and online technologies for boys and girls, which can in turn impact proficiency, experience, and participation. Dovey & Kennedy (2006) argue that in digital play it is not gender, race, or age per se that determines inclusion, but what they term

16 ‘technicity’, a network of technological competence (which is typically associated with white, male, heterosexual subjects like hackers and hardcore gamers). Thus, those who are able to access a wide range of technologies are those who are more likely to feel comfortable playing games. The problem, as shown in the above study, is that access tends to fall on gendered lines.

Bryce et al. (2006) note that women’s leisure constraints (such as more household and childcare tasks) contribute to the hostile nature of digital play for them. Since games are considered the technologies of the males in the household, and they claim expertise and dominion of these, feminine ability is often undermined. While some females do partake in digital play, they are often enacted as exotic, sexualized, or, as seen above, abnormal. McGinnis et al. (2003) find that constrained leisure time is a significant factor in the gendering of activities, and women and girls are understood as having less time to devote to gaming. This is part of the reason why the deriding of shorter casual games versus hardcore games requiring assiduous play is seen as another way of minimizing feminine gameplay. Thus, many realms of digital play are marked as masculine both through the coding of essentialist preferences and through the social norms enacted within physical spaces, which can reinforce the understanding of games as masculine tools and threaten the cultural intelligibility of femininity when women and girls attempt to play.

Access to new games is enough to generate changes in preference (Carr 2005), so participation must be understood as deeply interconnected with game preference and choice. Rather than selecting “pink games” because girls are innately attracted to, say, collaboration, nurturing activities, or a slow, introspective pace (Jenkins & Cassell 2008), girls often play girl games because they are most likely to be offered them, which can reinforce conventional understandings of both masculinity and femininity. For instance, while The Sims is argued to be

17 a great example of a game that embodies many of the cornerstones of the girl games movement without being packaged as a “pink game”, with relatable characters, variable outcomes, everyday settings, and goals achieved through social networking rather than combat (Jenkins & Cassell

2008), others note that this game is simply legitimized for female consumption through its implicit essentialization of the dollhouse and non-competitive play as what is needed and desired by girls (T.L. Taylor 2008). Indeed, interests often do not fall across gendered lines at all, as many young players regardless of gender will be attracted to cross-media texts like Harry Potter,

Yugioh!, and Pokemon, which serve to open the doors to new media for children and youths (Ito

2008b).

Overall, what players are permitted to play, through literal gateways to access, social legitimation, and popular culture familiarity, will often shape future consumption habits, which shows that situation, experience, and access are important considerations when studying architectures of control. This study aligned with others that showed that stereotyped categorizations of game preference were unsubstantiated in practice, with both boys and girls enjoying competition and aggression as well as sociability. It was primarily girls without access to consoles at home that felt that games were male activities (Carr 2005), and the culture of gaming does position being a gamer as a more socially acceptable position for boys than girls (N.

Taylor 2006). It is important, however, to remember that constituents of preference, especially access, are impacted by gender and this is why preference can manifest along gender lines, though it is not the sole or even primary determinant of gaming tastes (Carr 2005). As Yee

(2008) phrases it, when physical and social barriers to entry for female players are interpreted as a lack of desire to play games, we mistake “the how for the why” (p.88). As this study shows, it

18 is vitally important to consider both physical and social access when considering masculinity and femininity in not only the study of digital play, but in access to online technologies more broadly.

Conclusions

At issue in essentialized conceptualizations of gender in digital play is that these descriptions of masculine violence and feminine sociality, as well as other categories of preferences, assume and reify what it means to be a masculine and feminine subject. I undertook empirical research examining how children engage in online activities and enact their gender therein in order to gain insight into how coded design preferences and social norms can act together to constitute both intelligible and deviant forms of gendered play.

This project is partly a response to the fact that studies of gender and technology have been plagued with battles to overcome dichotomous thinking (passive/active, virtual/real, online/offline, etc). Instead, this project is premised on the idea that we need an integrated understanding of the Internet in everyday life, and “how online time and use fits with and complements other aspects of an individual’s everyday life” (Haythornthwaite 2001, p. 364). As

Allen (2010) notes, Internet activities do not occur outside of everyday life, but in close interaction with unmediated human behaviour. As the above outline of the study results has shown, the design of virtual realms for youth play works in mutually constitutive ways with social norms around gender and technology, as enacted through domestic practices that constrain and enable particular forms of access and participation online.

19 Focusing on gender as a practice, as performed and enacted, allows the researcher to better understand gender and digital culture as assemblages and networks of production, culture, marketing, content, mechanics, and preferences (Carr 2005, Jenson & de Castell 2008, T. L.

Taylor 2008). The reification of stable categories of gender is problematic in light of opportunities for the creation of new configurations of the categories of masculinity and femininity and how new types of games and platforms of gaming, including virtual worlds, could challenge understandings of video game play and technological competence more broadly as exclusively masculine. These challenges are less valuable when they simply reify in turn other gendered mythologies, for instance of the mom in the case of the marketing of the Wii (Dyer-

Witheford & de Peuter 2009).

Gendered access to virtual realms is not limited to considerations of play. We must consider how young people are understood as technology users in light of all questions of empowerment or exploitation and participation or consumption online. Whether young people are engaged or disinterested in politics online (Wells 2010), in reading commercial content in negotiated and resistant ways (Shade & Grimes 2005), or in authoring subversive or creative identities online

(Thomas 2007), depends in pivotal ways on how access is negotiated in the domestic sphere and how their practices are enacted in the family, in conjunction with the coding of gendered preferences through site design. Indeed, as even brief analysis of the lived realities of youth and parents shows, youth participation is shaped by a dynamic and heterogeneous network of norms, discourses, texts, images, and power relations (Law and Hassard 1999). Future examinations of youth participation online, ranging from digital play to political activity to creative development,

20 should engage with this landscape of factors rather than resorting to binaristic discourses of empowerment and exploitation.

Lessig (2006) notes that design choices are not neutral but the very content of politics, as they are about process and how we reason about how things should be. They are also about power, as they indicate how it is only a select few that get to decide the answers in the climate of government and commercial control. We must, however, be wary about attributing the limits and possibilities for participation solely to the constraints of code. While code as a regulator online can enable and constrain certain practices, we need to consider the network of factors that not only contributes to these values but that works in conjunction with code to shape participation.

Lessig (2006) very astutely posits that “codes constitute cyberspaces; spaces enable and disable groups. The selections about code are therefore in part a selection about who, what, and most important, what ways of life will be enable and disabled” (p.88). We must take this one step further and examine how not only commerce and state but the normative order of social structures such as gender constitute and are in turn constitutive of these codes, creating very real architectures of control which can in turn lead to fruitful participation or limited access.

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