Review Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software, by Mizuko Ito
Book Review: Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software.
Mizuko Ito. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. 234 pp. ISBN: 9780262013352.
Mizuko Ito’s book, “Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software” explores the ongoing construction of kid’s software genres. Her “working hypothesis” is that the proliferation of digital tools engages people in novel forms of linguistic, social, cognitive, and self-directed exploration. The effects of this exploration have altered expressions of identity, independence, creativity, and cognition. By focusing on the significance of children as co-producers of innovation and meaning, she calls necessary attention to the lacuna that has separated anthropology from a number of social science disciplines that take seriously issues of childhood.
Ito’s text draws attention to kid-computer interactions, especially in relation to agency, socialization, capitalism, play, and culture. Rather than a univocal story, she contends that the development of children’s software genres is the product of successes, failures, and ongoing negotiations between kids (as she points out they call themselves), parents, teachers, and software developers. The bulk of her book is comprised of three chapters spanning the ongoing sociocultural, creative, embodied, and market-oriented negotiations fueling the development of academic, entertainment, and construction software. To illustrate these everyday “micropolitical” negotiations, Ito relies on binaristic tensions like structure/agency, market/domestic, play/learning, and kid/adult. The result is a successful narrative that shows how the was computer further anchored in the American household by way of the child.
Ito’s bibliography is built upon theory from cultural anthropology, developmental psychology, visual and media studies, and Science and Technology Studies. Her analyses are also derived from meso-level multi-sited fieldwork conducted amongst kids and adults at three after school clubs in California hosted by the non-profit, 5th Dimension. Two of her sites were located in San Diego and another in Palo Alto. Ito’s observational work at 5th Dimension draws heavily on Bourdieu’s notion of “practice” to elucidate the dynamics connecting micro and macro scales (1990). Ito uses the kid’s engagements with computers at 5th Dimension to explain how their resistance against purely academic play performs an embodied critique that influences the design of educational commodities. To further understand the industry-mediated channels framing the production, circulation, and consumption of children’s software, Ito also conducted interviews with software developers. This rich layering effect is furthered by past and present-day analyses. By drawing on archival data, Ito reaches back in time to narrate the computer’s gradual domestication.
Before they became “digital natives” co-parented by the internet and video games, children in the Victorian era were expected learn bourgeois sensibilities through restricted interaction with toys and other forms of supposedly low-class hedonistic play. Ito’s chronological analysis shows how the popularity of styles and technologies of play connote certain ideals about childhood that ebb and flow in capitalist, sociocultural environments. In many ways, Ito tells the story of how American childhood has been structured by ever-changing boundaries distinguishing learning from play. At 5th Dimension, we see how computer interfaces can be poised as games to be enjoyed in and of themselves and/or the tools of educational labor kids must perform. By centering her analysis on kids, Ito performs another logical extension of Bourdieu’s work that explicates how software becomes a medium through which various adult stakeholders attempt to foster childhood habitus. Ones implicitly derived from American orientations toward, among other things, class, ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology.
By the 1980s, experimental software developers in the edutainment genre sought to reform the American educational system and democratize literacy by developing programs that synthesized learning with play. A technological critique of the standardization rampant in American school systems and the explicit distinction between play and learning, these developers sought a more pragmatic form of learning. Through the combination of fun with real world-problem solving and open-ended trajectories, these developers sought to adapt the computer to the phenomenological experience of children while encouraging their epistemological development. Yet, these early developer’s aspirations to improve the US education system were gradually dismantled by the constraints of the capitalist market, which prioritized consumption over innovation. One developer lamented, “They made it impossible to transform education alongside making huge profits by doing the same little programs over and over” (2009: 40).
Promoting the consumption and internalization of achievement and capitalizing off the anxieties of middle-class parents, academic software in the 1990s was marketed as a status symbol to parents. Less exploratory than its antecedent, this software boasted Mensa-like challenges and rigorous point systems. In this sense, children’s software was engineered to discipline kid’s aspirations toward the attainment of social distinction as opposed to playful exploration. However, kid’s lack of interest in these games dissuaded parents from buying into the genre and its popularity declined. Uninspired by formally academic software, kids eager to participate in gaming then fueled the expansion of the entertainment genre.
More kid-entered, this genre emphasizes youth culture, appeals directly to kid imaginations, and playfully promotes parental subversion. Ito notes how this genre of engagement was evident at 5th Dimension. While adults encouraged them to engage with the software’s academic content, the kids were often more captivated by the game aesthetics showed a tendency to willfully switch from goal-oriented to fun-oriented, exploratory engagement. Ito contends that the kid’s embodied commitment to ”fun” can be understood as a “micropolitics of pleasure” and also resistance (2009: 131). 5th Dimension was a location where kids resisted engaging with standardized knowledge in pursuit of professional achievement.
Ito contends that, “Today’s children and youth are growing up in a media ecology where producing, modifying, messing around with, customizing, and sharing digital media are part of every day life (2009: 185).” The need for flexibility and adaptability is exemplified by construction genre games like SimCity, which emphasize authorship and the design of digital worlds. Such games are more conducive to play because they facilitate agency, appeal to sensorial pleasure, and emphasize education through open-ended, procedural learning. Ito’s apparent preference for construction-oriented games implicitly critiques not only the standardization of learning but also the presumably “normal” computer-using kid. Building on Ito’s insights, future ethnographies should explore how children’s software fosters and reinforces phenomenologically and ontologically normative conceptualizations of learning.
Ito succeeds in her attempt to show how the interplay of structure and agency can spur the development and circulation of technologies. In doing so, she not only highlights the agency of childhood but the agency of the imagination as well. Stylistically, Ito’s language draws on the anthropological register but overall, her text is accessible to a wider audience. Her prose is complemented by a wealth of transcripts she uses to ground her analyses. Additionally her utilization of visual studies to analyze numerous software advertisements concretizes her claims and conceptually engages the visually inclined. Her work also speaks directly to polemical debates surrounding video games that situate play and learning as oppositional. Ito’s discussion of play, learning, technology, and agency make her relevant and beneficial to scholars interested in technology and childhood development, as well as parents and educators.
Ito’s insights culminate into a robust impetus for future research. Her assertion that children participate in technological innovation has strong theoretical implications. Actor-network theory calls for increased attention to non-human entities. Yet, in its application, human actors are typically conceptualized as adults. Ito’s work thus challenges people to consider if and how kids are counted in networks. At the same time, applying Ito’s insights to actor-network theory’s emphasis on materiality also stimulates new ways to think about kids and computers–as well as the role of imagination and improvisation in play. Ito shows how the kids at 5th Dimension tended to push the boundaries of both software and adult expectations. Also material and immaterial, the computer’s flexibility can be seen as both analogous and conducive to the imagination.
Ito’s ethnographically thick descriptions enable her text to be read playfully alongside other theories centered on the creative dimensions of play such as those explored by Jean Piaget. He contended that kids can use their imaginations to improvise during symbolic play. Imagination enables kids to creatively interact with immaterial phenomena in a process akin to transduction, where physical objects can be transformed into other material or immaterial objects, and visa versa (1962). In another sense, Ito shows how cultural ideals of childhood are also transduced into software designed to cultivate a certain habitus for burgeoning US adults though the distinction of play from the work of epistemological socialization, a boundary the kids actively balk.
Taking their phenomenological experience of symbolic play seriously, the versatility of imagination enables kids to creatively elaborate on environmental parameters and interact with material and immaterial phenomena. By using improvisation and imagination to playfully resist software circumscribing their participation in physical and digital environments, the kids at 5th Dimension engage in acts of playful self-authorship. Although Ito poignantly illustrates how the computer has been engineered to foster certain notions of development, identity, play and knowledge, the kids at 5th Dimension show that they can still innovate the course of predetermined trajectories in favor of more idiosyncratic journeys.
Works Cited:
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ito, Mizuko. 2009 Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children’s Software.
Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Piaget, Jean. 1962 Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton.