How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities.

Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds.

Play is fundamentally important for kids' development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids' play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well—responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.

For decades, Yasmin Kafai has been an essential, careful scholar of the learning interactions and possibilities between children and technology. It is unsurprising then that this volume (written with her now graduated doctoral student, Deborah Fields) is a fantastic further contribution to the field. In the book, Kafai and Fields detail their work studying the activities and culture of tweens (nine to twelve year‐olds) in the online virtual world, Whyville. What they document provides both a compelling portrait of what virtual worlds have to offer young people as well as an atlas for where further interesting work may lie.—Teachers College Record
Yasmin B. Kafai is Lori and Michael Milken President's Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, coauthor of Connected Gaming, Connected Code, and Connected Play (all published by MIT Press) and other books.

Deborah A. Fields is Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.

Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people, in Japan and the United States, and a Professor in Residence at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

About

How kids play in virtual worlds, how it matters for their offline lives, and what this means for designing educational opportunities.

Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In Connected Play, Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds.

Play is fundamentally important for kids' development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids' play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well—responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.

Reviews

For decades, Yasmin Kafai has been an essential, careful scholar of the learning interactions and possibilities between children and technology. It is unsurprising then that this volume (written with her now graduated doctoral student, Deborah Fields) is a fantastic further contribution to the field. In the book, Kafai and Fields detail their work studying the activities and culture of tweens (nine to twelve year‐olds) in the online virtual world, Whyville. What they document provides both a compelling portrait of what virtual worlds have to offer young people as well as an atlas for where further interesting work may lie.—Teachers College Record

Author

Yasmin B. Kafai is Lori and Michael Milken President's Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, coauthor of Connected Gaming, Connected Code, and Connected Play (all published by MIT Press) and other books.

Deborah A. Fields is Assistant Professor of Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences at Utah State University.

Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people, in Japan and the United States, and a Professor in Residence at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.