Reader-Players: The 39 Clues, Cathy's Book, and the Nintendo DS

While participatory culture is a relatively new concept, children's texts and games arguably have a long history of demanding active reader participation. For example, Marah Gubar's Artful Dodgers makes a compelling argument for Golden Age children's authors' respect for engaged child readers and its ramifications: "these writers were invested in blurring rather than policing the subject positions of child and adult, reader and writer. Yet even as they represent the child as a potential collaborator, they also recognize that the idea of reciprocity can itself function as a seductive mirage that curtails the agency of children" (7–8). Gubar's insights about children participating as collaborators are useful far beyond understanding the Victorian period in children's literature; many current children's texts depend on this (uneven) "reciprocity" among child, writer, and text as co-participants in creating their meaning.

Current books like the ten novels in The 39 Clues series (2008–2010) by various authors or the Cathy's Book trilogy (2006, 2008, 2009) by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman are created with active, participative readers in mind. They extend their reach beyond the codex to include websites, voice mail, playing cards, and more as part of the reading experience. Video games like Trace Memory (Cing 2005) are branded as "interactive mystery novel[s] come to life," and video games like Scribblenauts (5th Cell Media 2009) depend on users' input to produce meaning. All of these texts present challenges for analysis because they are not restricted to a single medium, a single source text, and/or a single method of reader interaction. They are, to borrow media theorist N. Katherine Hayles's term, intermediated: "they involve complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media," and they depend on the materiality of the text itself, the subjectivity of the user, and the dynamic, recursive process both user and text participate in to create meaning (7). By combining Marah Gubar's concept of child-as-collaborator with Hayles's theory of intermediation, we can examine current media-enhanced children's texts and reconnect them to the traditions of children's literature and playable media.

Texts like The 39 Clues, Cathy's Book, Trace Memory, and Scribblenauts all require the reader to participate in a variety of ways: asking her to use her knowledge of intertextual information, to do outside research, to solve puzzles, to play games. Three core similarities among these media-enhanced children's texts allow them to create meaningful interactions with their users: their acknowledgment and manipulation of the reader-player's expectations, their dependence on both rules and narrative, and their relationship to collaboration and collective intelligence. And these three characteristics apply to more than just current media-enhanced children's texts. That these current texts are more complexly intermediated is important, but their intermediation (dependence on complex transactions between the material text and the subjective user) is a question of scale rather than presence; children's texts have been performing these same core functions since their inception. By focusing on both the relationship between the material and the subjective via intermediation and the way child characters and players are invited to become (limited) collaborators, we can discover methods of evaluating all children's texts, media-enhanced or not, on the same terms. The core questions at the heart of this model are: How does the text communicate to the user what actions and knowledge are meaningful, and What ramifications does this dynamic have for the readerplayer and for our constructions of childhood?

The 39 Clues and Cathy's Book

Playable children's texts depend on the user's process and expectations, which make them complicated to analyze. Media theorist and digital fiction writer Noah Wardrip-Fruin notes that "the operations of digital media are, in crucial ways, only truly realized in contact with audiences" (11). The user's expectations of what the text will be and will do shape what it can be and can do. Readerplayers come to game books with expectations about the genres and mechanics of the...