Monster High: Playing in the Converging Imaginaries of a Virtual Dollhouse

• In Event: Virtual Worlds and Video Games: Synergies in Research

Abstract

Background. Children’s play is moving online, squeezed out of academically-oriented classrooms (Hirsch-Pacek, Golinkoff, & Singer, 2009; Johnson, 2013; Author, 2009) and vanishing on playgrounds and in neighborhood streets where unsupervised outdoor play is construed as unsafe and undesirable (Miller & Almon, 2009; Tolbert Kimbro, Brooks-Gunn, & McLanahan, 2011). However in digital space where children still play, toys and technologies increasingly converge in pervasive transmedia toy franchises (Herr-Stephenson, Alper, & Reilly, 2013; Shuler, 2012). As children connect to their favorite toys, media, and games on tablets, cameras, and phones, they play in apps and websites that converge childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas (Jenkins et al., 2006). A growing body of research on young children’s virtual worlds and online gaming (Marsh, 2010, 2011, 2015; Black & Reich,2012; Hafner, 2015; Burnett & Merchant, 2014; Fields & Kafai, 2010; Grimes, 2010; 2015a; 2015b; Mitzuko et al., 2008; Author & Colleague, 2013; Author & Colleagues, 2009) suggests the possibilities and the tensions in children’s imaginative play on commercial playspaces designed to meet corporate goals, situated along a persistent gender divide in toys and digital media.

Purpose. To analyze the monsterhigh.com website as a virtual dollhouse, looking across connected playspaces for repetitions and ruptures in both the content and player/computer interactions with commercially-produced media (video games, apps) and fan-produced media (blog posts, videos). Does this highly popular doll site enable creative and strategic play needed for participatory literacies in digital cultures? Are girls doing more than playing simple repetitive games, dressing up avatars, caring for pets and decorating rooms in virtual dollhouses?

Methods. Nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004; Norris & Jones, 2005; Author, 2009) and actor network theory (Latour, 2006) make visible the social, material, and ideological effects of media convergence in children’s imaginative labor, and cultural production as converging social practice also converge human and digital actants and their supporting discursive expectations. When media practices repeat or support one another across imaginaries, shared normative expectations for ideal players and performances are thickened and amplified. Similarly, conflicting practices create ruptures disrupting the expected trajectories. Analysis of websites, apps, and children’s YouTube videos identifies repetitions of social practices in doll play, making visible the resonances across converging cultural imaginaries as well as ruptures that open opportunities for player agency and redesign.

Findings. In the Monster High virtual dollhouse, children play out blended activities that are simultaneously simulated and real: dressing their avatars, creating imagined profiles, shopping, playing games, purchasing in-app goods, watching and “liking” videos, recruiting followers/friends, and affiliating with the brand and other fans. Examination of child-produced digital dress-up and online doll play on social media shows that players remake commercial imaginaries for their own purposes in ways that both reproduce and rupture gender expectations.

Significance. These lived-in practices align with particular visions of girlhood that circulate naturalized and normalizing expectations for girls that converge in transmedia, highlighting the need for 1) nuanced and expanded research on children’s transmedia engagements, 2) productive play and digital literacies, and 3) critical media literacy in schools.

Author

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington