Code, Norms, and Virtual Worlds for Youth Abstract Tensions

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. 2 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

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