A Possible Childhood: Video Games, Narrative, and the Child Player

In her seminal work on children's fiction, Jacqueline Rose offers up Peter Pan as a "self-diagnosing symptom of cultural malady," a malady characterized by its projected and disempowered idea of the child (xiv). Written at the beginning of the twentieth century, J. M. Barrie's story highlights, in Rose's view, that "there is no child behind the category 'children's fiction,' other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own [adult] purposes" (10). In contrast, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, children's stories have begun to find a place for the child. Specifically, role-playing video games (RPGs) are generating a means to a possible child and empowered childhood in their narrative structures. More specifically, a very particular type of RPG deploys narrative perspective—or to use more contemporary narratological terms, focalization—to bring into being a child with agency, voice, and a self-defined identity.

As a video game genre, RPGs tell stories—stories of war, love, community building, growing up, solving crimes, and saving the world. For example, one of the best-known RPGs, World of Warcraft, tells the story of an epic battle between good and evil for control of a fantasy universe inhabited by a range of beings. It has been compared to fantasy texts such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, and plots and narrative details are expansive and appear in both online video game format and in more traditional story forms (for example, there are a number of story novelizations, and a World of Warcraft movie is slated for release in summer 2011). Nonetheless, while RPGs tell stories, they do so in ways that are different from those of other storytelling modes (that is, print, film, dramatic performance). Most notably, in RPGs the player becomes an active, influential part of the storytelling apparatus as s/he engages in play by becoming a character in the story.

There are many RPGs and many kinds of RPGs. Indeed, the range of the genre and the fluidity of their game characteristics may be the one thing that unites them as a group. The most relevant RPGs in terms of children and children's stories, though, are the nonviolent, adventure-oriented games intended for "Everyone."¹ These "Everyone" RPGs—game franchises such as Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Pokémon, and Professor Layton—take center stage here because they seem appropriate for children. That, of course, is a vague and silly description, and yet my audience likely knows what I mean by "for children," which is something like what I (and maybe they) might mean by "children's literature."

At the same time, in terms of Everyone RPGs, "the child" is something different than "the child" of children's literature: the Everyone RPG's child is included by the rating designator as part of an "Everyone" rather than being marked as "other" and/or "different" by the word "child." Even more remarkable is the constitution of this "Everyone" child, this digital child, this idea of childhood. For, this "child" is granted intelligence, logic, and possibility. It is an idea endowed with power, authority, and agency. It is an idea that, as a played role, can be inhabited by an actual child.

Perhaps that is the appeal of these kinds of games. These Everyone RPGs allow child players an ontological position that may be unavailable in their lived existence. Or, perhaps these games are a force in the (re)construction of contemporary childhood—or a reflection of such a (re)construction. Does the child of such games suggest a fundamental paradigm shift in the notion of the child, a shift as grand and as noticeable as that located in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nexus of John Locke's, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, and Puritan thinking? Such questions cannot be answered here, as they are the kinds of questions that find more definitive resolution in hindsight rather than in the lived moment. Still, as suggested by media scholar Marshall McLuhan, there is...