Negotiating Rules, Roles, and Ideologies in Children's Narrative Gameplay

• In Event: Games as Dialogues Between Pasts and Futures: Playing Toward Educational Reimagination

Abstract

Games are robust contexts for learning (Squire, 2006) that are mediated across a breadth of spatialities (Garcia, 2020) and interactions (Author, 2025; Author et al., 2023). To strategically navigate gameplay, players must leverage their sociotechnical knowledge of rules and roles to shape playful experiences (Cortez et al., 2023). Building on actor network theories of interaction (Latour, 1992), research on play has explored how mechanics and platform design constitute an assemblage of agents and processes that inform community practices (Taylor, 2009). Building on the above scholarship, this paper inquires into the ways that players develop their own unique rules and roles – both in ways that reify and revise the intended trajectories of play imposed by game designers and developers.

Specifically, this paper follows the playful practices of an online community of three Brazilian-American children: Sofia, Davi, and Alicia. These three children frequently played together on a digital gaming platform called Roblox – a repository of thousands of user-generated minigames. The children’s favorite Roblox minigame was a role-playing game (RPG) titled Brookhaven. Unlike other Roblox games with specific goals and win conditions (e.g., obstacle courses), Brookhaven invited players to create their own goals as they navigated a virtual town and performed open-ended narratives of daily life. In addition to the various developer-generated mechanics of Brookhaven that determined how players could or should interact, we analyzed the unique rules and roles that Sofia, Davi, and Alicia generated during play. Moreover, we considered how the children’s unique playful processes communicated certain values and ideologies. The following three research questions guided our analysis: 1) How did Sofia, Davi, and Alicia encounter and make sense of developer-generated game mechanics during playful interactions in Brookhaven?, 2) How did the children compose their own user-generated rules and roles while co-authoring narratives of family life?, and 3) What values and ideologies emerged from the children’s strategic negotiations of online play?

Data for this project was generated during a year-long connective ethnography (Hine, 2000) of Sofia, Davi, and Alicia’s lives while engaging in narrative-based play in Brookhaven. To explore our research questions, we first reviewed scholarship on children’s digital geographies (Arnott et al., 2019; Hammond, 2020; Konca et al., 2024; Mills et al., 2024) and user-generated game mechanics (Dyment & O’Connell, 2013; Gervais, 2009; Hayes, 2008). Then, we thought with concepts from actor network theory (Latour, 1992) and ludic inquiry (Rapti & Gordon, 2021) to analyze moments when the children encountered and (re)designed the conditions of play. Our findings highlight how Sofia, Davi, and Alicia’s playful negotiations reflected their experiences, values, and goals across their digital and analog lives. Study discussion and implications critically interrogate how the rules and roles of interaction in gaming contexts interface with the norms and ideologies of offline life.

Authors

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University

• Mariana Lima Becker, University of Georgia