Graduate Student, Communication
Thesis Title: The digital child at play
About
Sara M. Grimes is a PhD Candidate with the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research explores the legal and ethical dimensions of children’s evolving relationship with new media technologies, the rationalization of children’s play within commercialized technological systems, and the political economy of digital games. Her more recent work has focused on children's online advertising regulation, the legal and cultural implications of child-generated content, and a co-authored analysis (with Neil Narine) of discursive representations of the child gamer within popular film and advertising. She has also recently completed a collaborative project with Andrew Feenberg, adapting his theory of instrumentalization to construct a framework for the discussion of games as systems of social rationalization (published in vol. 25, no.2 of The Information Society).
Sara's dissertation examines emerging digital play spaces designed specifically for children, with a focus on corporately-owned, game-themed virtual worlds (massively multiplayer online games, or MMOGs). Her thesis explores how transmedia convergence, promotional priorities, and dominant social and political assumptions about children come to shape the technological design of children's digital games and virtual play spaces--which in turn determine affordances, delineate action opportunities, script user interactions, and configure the child user in important and often overlooked ways. Her research examines how this relationship, which enters into the users' gameplay experience as specific arrangements of formal and informal rule systems (computer code, terms of use, codes of conduct, community norms, etc.), unfolds within the specific contexts of six case study MMOGs, and addresses the complex role of the child user in both reproducing and resisting corporately-controlled (and technologically enforced) "rules of play".
Contact Information
http://gamineexpedition.blogspot.com/
