What criteria come into play when children assess challenge, intimidation and harm in games? To explore this question we use material from an interview co-produced by a parent (Carr) and child (‘Cheesycat Puff’ aka CC), in combination with the transcription of an audio-recorded, co-played session of Minecraft. The approach is informed by literature on auto-ethnography (e.g. Ellis, Adams, Bochner 2011), and shaped to some extent by the game-like assessments that we have encountered in clinical settings, including child development units and audiology departments. This is relevant, because it is our experience that even in clinical settings the meaning of a game is not determined by its rules or goals. As with the games that we play at home, these game-like assessments (with their beads, puzzles, buzzes, tricks, rules, challenges and goals) can generate varied, elusive and contradictory meanings. Consider, for example, this session with an occupational therapist: it’s summer 2012 and the health-worker is playing a game of catch-and-pass the sandbag with CC as part of an assessment of her coordination and motor skills. At the same
time, CC is playing a game of “Can I hit that light, with this sandbag?” She is having a good time. The health-worker is not. What is evident is that the rules, goals and the scoring of the sandbag game as set by the health worker do not determine the meaning of the game for CC, or for me as spectator. It doesn’t
follow, of course, that all potential meanings are equal. My daughter’s glee in non-compliance might be considered ephemeral whereas the score that is generated by the health-worker has repercussions. It goes on record. What matters, in the context of this particular paper, is that the health-worker’s production of a score involves a process of extrication. She produces an authorized meaning of the game by threshing out
and discarding the alternatives.
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