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While the potential benefits or drawbacks of children playing video games receive a lot of attention, little notice is taken of the place of children within video games themselves.

A recent survey at the Anglia Ruskin University, Great Britain, investigated how children were represented in over 500 commercially successful video games, aimed both at adults and at children, published between 2009 and 2019. Although video games are often considered a children’s medium, it was found that, out of the 506 video games analysed, 331 did not contain any child characters at all. In the remaining titles that did feature a child character, less than half of them were significant characters.

How “the child” is treated in media like video games is a reflection of the morals of wider society. If a game treats children badly without explicitly condemning this treatment, it violates these morals. This accounts for the absence of child characters in controversial open-world games that predominantly invite players to steal cars, shoot people, and evade the police.

Children were also absent from games that aren’t particularly violent. Child characters did not feature in the majority of sports, racing or music games. Because the majority of children are excluded from the world of work, games that simulate aspects of real industries represent virtual environments that are only populated with adults.

Child characters in video games can also tell us about how society visualises the figure of the child. Adult characters in video games are more likely to be white and male. This same pattern was observed in the research on child characters. Where playable child characters were given a gender, 25 were male and six were female. The lack of playable girl characters reinforces the idea that boys are at the centre of the action and girls exist only on the sidelines.

Animal or other non-human characters were more common than non-white child characters. This echoes a problem in western children’s literature: non-human characters appear less frequently than white child protagonists but significantly outnumber child protagonists of all other races. Examining the digital kids that populate virtual gameworlds is a great way to show that how societies perceive “the child” is often in a narrow and exclusionary way.

(Emma Joy Reay. www.theconversation.com, 01.06.2022. Adaptado)