CFP, Special Issue of The Lion and the Unicorn (Vol. 52.2 [2028])

Child’s Play:

Representation and Games in Children’s Media and Culture

(guest editor, Gretchen Papazian)

Deadline for 18-20-page/3,500-4,000-word submission: March 31, 2027

Early in the 2000s, scholar Eric Zimmerman declared that, while the 18th and 19th Centuries fashioned their cultures in print, and while the 20th Century expressed itself most powerfully in film and video, the then-new 21st Century would be an era of games: the ludic century. Now—a quarter of the way into the century—the assertion seems true enough as the board game industry booms, video game sales outpace sales of all other media, gamic structures have deeply permeated both filmic and text-based media, and “gamification” infiltrates daily life. Predictably, the study of games has also expanded. As the body of analysis forms, it has much to learn from children’s media. For, not only have “play” and “playfulness” been defining characteristics of “the child” and childness, but, arguably, children’s literature itself has been game-based from its start (e.g., John Newbery’s 1744 A Pretty Little Pocket-Book).

While scholars of children’s media have already been deeply involved in the emerging study of games, there has not yet been an effort to synthesize such thinking. This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn aims to do just that: collect together scholarship dedicated to investigating the range of ways games and gaming appear in texts designed for children, in text that represent children, and/or in texts created by children.

Studies might focus on children’s print texts, children’s film or television, board or video games for or representing children, educational games, or even “playground” games—that is, games children play with each other in their neighborhoods, at camp, at school.

General topics could include: What is a children’s game? What is play? What kinds of games do children’s texts play? What purposes do games serve in children’s texts and/or for “the child” represented in the text? What can we learn from representations of games and play—or from children’s play itself? Does studying games in relation to children require different tools or ways of thinking than studying games “generally”?

Specific questions being addressed might include: How do games function in the lives of children from various cultural, racial, geographic, and class backgrounds? How do they structure relationships—between children, between children and adults? What is the relationship between games and story according to texts for children? What emotional patterns or cognitive scripting emerge in, out of, around, and through children’s games, game-based texts, or representations of gaming in texts for children?

Altogether, the issue aims to take stock of what texts for children have to say about (and through) games and gaming as we enter into the second quarter of the 21st Century. Both children’s literature with its long history of attention to games and play, and children’s literature scholarship with its well-developed tools for looking at playful texts and thinking deeply about audience in relation to text, are well-positioned to theorize about games, as well as to reveal what is at play in games—ideologically, ontologically, epistemologically—in the ludic century.

For further information, inquiries, and submissions,

email Gretchen Papazian at papaz1gd@cmich.edu.