The child in games: representations of children in contemporary videogames (2009-2019)

Abstract

This paper examines representations of children in contemporary video games through content analysis. A selection of commercially successful and critically acclaimed video games published within the last ten years (n=506) was sampled in order to determine what proportion of these titles contained child characters. The games that contained child characters (including non-human and quasi-human child characters) were analyzed to ascertain the relative importance of these child characters. If they were found to play a significant role, the child characters were then coded for race, gender and age. The sample was categorized according to genre to discern whether child characters were more prevalent in some genres over others. Finally, the corpus was organized by year of publication to see if the proportion of games containing child characters varied over time. The results show that the majority of successful video games published between 2009 and 2019 did not contain any child characters at all. 19% of the total games sampled contained significant child characters, of which around half were playable characters. Most child characters were aged between 6 and 11 years old, and white, male children outnumbered non-white children of different genders. Child characters appeared more frequently in games categorised as “Action,” “Role-playing” and “Adventure” than they did in games from the “Sports,” “Strategy,” “Rhythm” and “Sandbox” genres, and the proportion of games containing child characters has remained fairly constant over the past ten years. The paper concludes by suggesting future directions for research conducted at the intersection of childhood studies and game studies

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ORCID for Emma Reay: orcid.org/0000-0003-2193-6564

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