Digital games such as Minecraft currently hold a position of significance in the media diets of many children. However, little is known explicitly about just who plays, with whom and how. This article presents the quantitative results of a survey of 753 parents of children aged 3–12 years about their child’s engagement with Minecraft. Our results establish Minecraft as the dominant digital game title played by this age group, particularly on tablet devices. We provide evidence of a marked early gendering of children’s Minecraft play and engagement with meta-game material. This research gives particular impetus to efforts aimed at ensuring gender equity in digital game–related cultural spaces inhabited by children. It also highlights the importance of collecting game-specific descriptive information, rather than limiting studies to aggregate measures of ‘screen time’.

Fortnite is a massively multiplayer online “battle royale” game that rapidly grew in 2018 to become one of the most popular digital games in the world, with a reported peak of 10.8 million concurrent players and 250 million registered players in March 2019. Based on 24 interviews with young people aged 9–14 (17 boys and 7 girls), this article sets out to provide an account of the appeal and experience of Fortnite. While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly why Fortnite has been such a phenomenal, global success, in this article, we argue that its appeal can be better explained by its intersections with YouTube and game livestreaming, the way the game acts as a vehicle for social capital and the performance of identity, and the rich sociality of play.

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Playing digital games is increasingly pathologized as an addiction or a disorder, but there is limited research into the impact of game addiction discourse on children who play digital games. In this article, we present results from a study into the digital play of twenty-four 9–14-year-olds, attending to our participants’ perspectives and attitudes towards ‘game addiction’ and how it interacts with their play and identity. Focused primarily on the online multiplayer first-person shooter game Fortnite, we examine how children encounter and attempt to negotiate game addiction discourse and demonstrate how the discourse in and of itself produces challenges for young people whose interests and passions revolve around games. This article subsequently discusses how the discursive frameworks that are perpetuated in the media around ‘problematic play’ need to incorporate and be inclusive of the child’s right to play, and the relevance of our findings to the study of media panic and children’s critical media literacies.

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