This paper will examine recent developments in the youth-oriented gaming industry to understand emerging structures of value and circulation. Platforms such as Fortnite and Roblox have sought to characterise activity on their services as ‘experiences’ rather than games - positioning themselves as mediators of a wide range of activity beyond gaming and play. At the same time, they use the language and affect of play to shape young people's creativity. Strong critique has been levelled at this tendency to turn children and youth into 'gamesworkers'. However, there is a very broad range of phenomena to take into account in addition to the most exploitative aspects highlighted in such critiques.

Drawing on textual analysis of Fortnite's 2023 "Big Bang" event, and focus groups conducted with children from 6-12 years of age across the second half of 2023, this paper will utilise theories of digital labour and play to present a method for how games platforms are building new dispositifs (following Angela McRobbie) that shape young people's creative and playful activity.

Beginning in 1998, the Nancy Drew game series comprises over 30 titles and has spawned a robust online fan community that continues today. These games are one of the most enduring and commercially successful products to arise from the girls’ game movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s – an effort to develop video games for girls and in turn to modify the gender dynamics of game culture more generally (Cassell and Jenkins 1998). Nancy Drew games are often praised as a successful example of the girls’ game movement because they encourage exploration, agency, and mobility for girls (Brathwaite 2018). Yet, the racial or colonial politics of this spatial exploration have not been addressed in discussions of girls’ games or of the online cultures that have formed around these games. When game companies make efforts to get girls into games by creating gendered game spaces, what are the politics of constructing, inhabiting, and navigating these spaces? This paper will consider what types of play spaces are offered for girls to inhabit and navigate in the Nancy Drew games and what type of girlhood Her Interactive sought to make feel “at home” in these spaces, both by studying production documents and online fan discourses. It seeks to contribute to digital game scholarship by discussing the racial and colonial ideologies that can be found in feminized game spaces. Specifically, I will consider the feminized white spatial imaginaries constructed in Nancy Drew games and online spaces.

Though discursive shifts signal increasing enthusiasm for children's digital play when instrumental educational outcomes are evident, limited attention has been paid to its possible wellbeing benefits or the reasons that children engage with it. The time that children invest in digital game play presents an opportunity for the global digital games industry to contribute positively to children’s well-being. Empirical research must first examine the diverse relationships between children’s digital play and their wellbeing.

This paper reports on an international, ecoculturally and ethnographically informed and semi-longitudinal study in collaboration with a children's digital game industry partner and a global child's rights organisation to consider: what drives the digital play choices and practices of a diverse cohort of children?; and how do these findings contribute to understanding the relationship between children’s digital play and their wellbeing? This paper draws on a subset of UK data (20 families) amongst a total 50 case study families who were involved across four countries.

The study provides diverse examples of digital play supporting dimensions of children’s subjective wellbeing. However, children’s digital play choices and practices were influenced by diverse and often intersecting factors, most compellingly, by different deep interests, desires and needs, understood in the present study as ‘digital play drivers’. The findings offer an empirically grounded expansion of past ‘needs’ approaches and foreground the mediating role played by digital play drivers in the relationship between digital games and children’s subjective wellbeing. Implications for the children's digital game industry are discussed.

For its global popularity and market expansion, K-pop idol culture has been integrated into child peer culture on social media, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. This is particularly noticeable in the form of K-pop dance challenges on short-form platforms/functions like Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, where people replicate choreographic moves from latest K-pop songs and post short-form videos with hashtags. Children casually join the trending challenges for fun and post videos by themselves, their parents, and even third-party companies, including child influencer agencies and K-pop training companies. This paper interrogates how this phenomenon has evolved into children’s new peer culture within the context of the influencer and K-pop culture industries. I discuss how children are positioned and presented in the evolving landscape of culture industries in the Asia Pacific region. I argue that this genre serves as a new version of ‘child pageant programs’ where childhood is performed and presented as a mixture of cuteness, innocence, immature maturity, and prodigious skills for the adult gaze. Pertinent issues surrounding children’s agency and wellbeing are also discussed, such as children’s everyday digital labor and the subsequent normalization of commodified childhood innocence in the industries. Crucially, the virality-centered algorithms of social media platforms underpinned in K-pop dance challenges further normalizes children’s seamless labor of cute, with the myth of instant internet virality, stardom, and K-pop dream. This study is based on a 4-year ethnographic observation of children’s K-pop dance challenges in the Asia Pacific region.