Play in a Digital World - How Interactive Digital Games Shape the Lives of Children

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper

Interactive digital games are analyzed for their effects on young children’s lives and development, using Sesame Street’s mission to help children become smarter, stronger, and kinder as the organizing framework. The discussion synthesizes survey and research findings on children’s media use, then applies a nondigital play taxonomy to digital play to examine interactivity links to cognitive, health, and social-emotional outcomes. The work emphasizes how game affordances may support learning when they enable active involvement, cognitive engagement, meaning-making, social partners, iterative play, and joy, while calling for further research to clarify potential benefits and harms.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Play in a Digital World

Nature and Principles of Play

Nature of Digital Play

Play in a Digital World How Interactive Digital Games Shape the Lives of Children • Rachel M. Flynn, Rebekah A. Richert, and Ellen Wartella The authors discuss the impact of interactive digital games on the lives and the play of young children in terms of Sesame Street’s express mission to help children become smarter, stronger, and kinder. They conclude that such games have much the same effect as other types of play and call for more research to help use it. Key words: digital play; electronic games and child development; play and digital devices; Sesame Street; smarter, stronger, kinder With the invention of interactive telephones and other devices, new opportunities for play have become ubiquitous in the lives of even very young children. A national survey by Common Sense Media reported that nearly all American children under age eight live in a home with a tablet or smartphone (Rideout 2017). In a study of children’s use of different media and technologies, Rideout found that viewing television shows and movies remain the primary media for children younger than age six, although their playing of digital games on mobile devices has increased since earlier surveys conducted in 2011 and 2013. Children between the ages of two and four play digital games for about twenty minutes each day, sixteen of these minutes on mobile devices. Similarly, children between five and eight years of age play digital games for about fortytwo minutes each day, twenty-four of these minutes on mobile devices (Common Sense Media 2017). Recent research by Griffith and Arnold (2019) found that a sampling of four-year-olds using mobile media considered playing games—both educational and noneducational—a favorite activity. Now that digital games are ubiquitous in children’s homes, schools, and play spaces, we believe it critical to consider whether the nature of digital play benefits or harms children’s development. 54 American Journal of Play, volume 12, number 1 © The Strong [Contact Rachel M. Flynn at rachel.flynn@northwestern.edu](Contact Rachel M. Flynn at rachel.flynn@northwestern.edu) Since the introduction of the first commercial video games in the 1970s (Green and Bavelier 2007), the format and affordances of interactive games have been constantly evolving with technological advancements. Today, digital play includes playing video games on televisions with video game consoles, computer games, games on phones and tablets, hand-held video games, and augmented reality and virtual reality games found on different platforms. In this article, we consider how our understanding of children’s traditional play without technology applies to digital game play. We focus on young children before they reach formal schooling in first grade. Digital games are a culturally relevant part of young children’s everyday lives, so we examine the nature of play afforded in interactive games for its contribution to children’s healthy development as defined by Sesame Street’s curriculum and summarized by its stated mission to raise children who are smarter, stronger, and kinder. We apply a taxonomy of how to think about digital games based on this Sesame Street mission: In helping children become smarter, how does interactivity relate to cognitive development? In helping them become stronger, how does interactivity relate to health? And in helping them become kinder, how does interactivity relate to social and emotional development? Nature and Principles of Play Although most scholars argue that children can learn cognitive and social skills through play (Bodrova and Leong 2015; Vygotsky 1967), the difficulty of defining which activities are play and which are not has plagued psychologists interested in the role of play in development (see Zosh et al. 2018 for a review) . Zosh et al. (2018) recently presented a model of nondigital traditional play theorizing it to be a spectrum of activities that range from free play to playful instruction, which vary

FAQs

What mission framework is used to evaluate interactive digital games for children?

The article uses Sesame Street’s express mission to help children become smarter, stronger, and kinder as the basis for its analysis of game interactivity effects.

How is “digital play” examined in relation to traditional play?

It applies a nondigital play taxonomy to digital play to clarify how interactivity changes the pathways affecting cognitive development, health, and social-emotional growth.

What conditions are described as supportive of children’s learning through play?

Supportive play is characterized by active involvement, cognitive engagement, meaning-making, social partners, iterative expansion, and experiencing joy.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper