Ready Player Three? Children’s Ideas and Interactions with AI (and “AI”) in the Parasocial Gameworld

Abstract: AI technologies are rapidly being woven into the games, platforms, and devices that children use for digital play. Yet little is known about how children actually encounter, understand, and interact with AI in these spaces. This talk explores what happens when AI enters the children’s digital playground. Drawing on findings from a recently completed longitudinal study as well as emerging work on this topic, I examine children’s experiences with AI — both real and imagined — within an increasingly “parasocial gameworld,” where digital, nondigital, and postdigital play, media interactions, and (para)social relationships converge. I discuss the complex, at times contradictory, configurations of AI in children’s gaming lives: as a source of exciting creative possibility and novel play experiences, as a vector for unprecedented data collection and emotional manipulation, as a scapegoat for bad designs or faulty content moderation, among others. This talk argues for a play-based, participatory approach to children and AI that centers children’s own voices and perspectives in research, policy and design.

Bio: Sara M. Grimes is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and a Full Professor in Communication Studies at McGill University. She is the Director and Founder of the Kids Play Tech Lab, which is dedicated to exploring and supporting children’s rights in the design, use and regulation of digital games and other technologies of play. Dr. Grimes is the PI of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada funded Children and Age-Appropriate Game Design Project, a longitudinal, cross-cultural study of how ideas about age appropriateness shape how games are made, regulated and played. She is also PI of the upcoming Children at Play in the Parasocial Gameworld, a mixed-method study of the emergence of AI technologies, economies, and mythologies in children’s games. Her research and teaching are centered in the areas of child and youth digital media culture(s), critical theories of technology, and children’s rights in the digital environment. Her award-winning book, Digital Playgrounds: The Hidden Politics of Children’s Online Play Spaces, Virtual Worlds, and Connected Games, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. Her upcoming book, Kidfluenced (under contract with the University of California Press) examines the politics of children’s digital game and media making and content creation on commercially owned platforms.

This seminar virtual only: Zoom Link