The Ivory Tower

January 2005

E for Everyone – A Call for Interdisciplinary Studies

by Laurie Taylor and Cathlena Martin

Children's literature studies and video game studies have much to learn from each other. Game studies generally addresses all video games, without regards to a particular age range. While video games labeled “E for Everyone” may be played by adults and children, they are usually cartoonish and readily marketed to children. Similarly, children's literature addresses works that are specifically aimed at children, while the canonical or classic works are those that are enjoyed and cherished by readers of all ages.

The overlap in the child and adult audience is one area where children's literature and game studies connect. In addition, the two fields share a general culture stigma towards their primary sources, with most people viewing children's literature and video game players/readers as childlike (if not actually children). Further, the combination of image and text within children's literature and video games establishes a common structural vocabulary for analysis. These connections show how children's literature studies and game studies can complement each other; however, these are also some of the reasons that children's literature studies and game studies occupy a precarious position in academia.

Within the humanities, video games and children's literature are studied by a multitude of fields—including literature, history, psychology, and sociology—but neither reside primarily in any one of these fields. Because of this, games studies and children's literature each occupy an odd position within the humanities and within academia. Education departments most often house children's literature studies, and game studies rests more comfortably in computer science programs. In both cases, the primary fields of education and computer science focus more heavily on applied research and production (either the production of games or teaching as production) rather than theoretical and analytical research found more strongly in humanities programs. Humanities programs focus more on critical thinking, which consists of investigations into how and why children's literature and video games work as they do. These studies analyze narrative structure, the evolution of the form, intertextual references to other works, social dynamics of play and playful texts, and the visual presentation.

In many cases, children's literature and game studies are growing in non-traditional ways by including an emphasis on the culture of their readers and players. As two emerging fields, children's literature and game studies have more in common than the two fields realize. In particular, the rise of children's literature studies affords a useful connection to video game studies, as do video game studies afford a useful connection to studies of children's literature. The two fields intersect in various ways, including an emphasis on:

• The culture of the readers and players;
• Multimedia aspects within single texts, including works that combine image and text as with picture books, illustrated books and video games (even text based games sometimes have ASCII art that can be analyzed as illustration);
• Playful formats that often require reader/player interaction (even if it's simple interaction like clicking buttons or pulling tabs on pop-up and movable books);
• And, spatiality.

The emphasis on reader and player culture can be found in children's media, children's culture, and children's literature departments. Similarly as a developing field, game studies has been embraced by those studying games as both literary and cultural artifacts. In these, games are studied for their game play, the narratives they present, and the culture surrounding the games. This includes player forums, player cheating methods, player-created game mods and patches, and other areas where players interact with the culture of gaming in addition to the games themselves. Children's literature is also studied within the context of the culture of childhood. This is partially because of the mass-marketing of children's works as interpreted in multiple ways with the release of novels, picture books, films, and toys of the same story, concept, or characters.

The cultural emphasis in both fields stems from the multi-text and multi-form nature of the works themselves. Unlike more traditional literary forms, children's books and video games both combine visual and textual elements. From the blended forms like children's picture books to the chat displays for first-person shooters, or the dialogue balloons in role-playing games like those in the Final Fantasy series, video games and children's literature works exist as hybrid forms of image and text. In these hybrids, both components are necessary for the reading or playing of the work.

Like video games, many children's works require interaction, such as toy books, pop-up books and other children's works like the searching in Where's Waldo? Children's literature often also has a playful format as with the word games and puns in books like Alice in Wonderland, the riddling and questing in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and the branching and looping found in Choose Your Own Adventure type books .

Spatiality combines all of these aspects and spaces. The primary spaces for children's literature and video games are the created representational spaces within the games, the spaces of play, and the spaces of the cultures that surround and envelope these fields. Additionally, video games often emphasize spatiality by creating virtual play spaces in the same manner that children's books play with their spatial layout of the page or book, as with shape books, like books about cars that take the shape of a car.

Despite these and many other connections, few researchers—even within children's literature and culture programs—are actively investigating the connections between video games and children's literature. This is partially because there are so few children's literature and culture programs, and partially because most of the programs focus on children's literature to mean books and films for children. As more programs begin to include more aspects of children's literature and culture, video games become a necessary component in their research. Similarly, game studies has focused more often on games that appeal to adults or to all audiences. Programs that bridge video game studies and children's literature would serve to analyze and validate the literary study of superb games like those in the Super Mario series, as well as investigating the reasons for problematic game design as found in many of the poorer quality children's games that are based on literary works like The Polar Express and Peter Pan: Return to Neverland . While sections like the E3 Education Arcade and the Games for Health Initiative are beginning to bridge the gap between children's literature and game studies, they are doing so with an applied approach. The humanities can apply their analytical research to show that E really is for Everyone.

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Laurie Taylor
Laurie N. Taylor, PhD student at the University of Florida, researches and teaches video games and digital media at the University of Florida. She has published articles in Game Studies, Computers and Composition Online, and ImageTexT, and has forthcoming articles in several collections on video games. She has also writes a newspaper gaming column and radio programs for the public radio program "Recess!" Please see her website for more information.

Cathlena Martin
Cathlena Martin, PhD student at the University of Florida, researches and teaches children's literature and new media. She has articles forthcoming on the story of "Peter Pan" as told through video games. She has presented at numerous conferences on topics like celebrity authored children's literature, revisionist Little Red Riding Hood tales, and on revisionist and award-winning tales of the Three Little Pigs. She also writes a newspaper gaming column and about children's cultural events for the radio program "Recess!" Please see her website for more information.