Enlivening Play: Connected Toys and Children’s Agency in the Metaleptic Imagination

Playing with Childhood in the Twenty-First Century / University of Pittsburgh / Mar 2018

Internet-connected and app-enabled toys figure prominently in the contemporary playscape, from toys to life video games to augmented reality apps that overlay digital content onto the “real” world. Experiences combining screen-based and physical, live-action components have a long history, seen in early magic lantern performance and cinema. However, the prevalence of physical/digital hybrid play within contemporary children’s culture functions as a strategy to leverage the presumed virtues of physical play to mitigate critiques of children’s technology use. This hybrid play unsettles the conventional (and limiting) dichotomy of children’s media consumption as either active or passive.

Such playthings exemplify what I call the metaleptic imagination—a recurring topos in media and consumer culture characterized by the promise of ontologically distinct worlds colliding. In the case of children’s media, this collision is frequently thematized as a magical process whereby the product of the child’s imagination is animated in play. This paper traces key aesthetic, cultural and industrial features of the contemporary instantiation of the metaleptic imagination through both a historical overview of the trope of the permeable screen and through two case studies: Crayola’s Color Alive (Daqri, 2014) and Play-Doh TOUCH (Hasbro, 2016). Close analysis of these two products suggests several implications of how such play experiences define or circumscribe children’s agency.

Bringing two distinct worlds together under the promotional auspices of bringing kids’ creations “to life” is often deployed as a corrective against the perceived passivity of digital play. However, the commercial and technological infrastructures that facilitate this process of animation also raise questions. Historically, metalepsis in animation is typically staged as a contest between animator and their onscreen creation. As apps for children offer this same possibility, how do the legal frameworks of terms of service and end user license agreements specify ownership over children’s intellectual property? What long-term technological commitments in the form of hardware and software maintenance and compatibility are undertaken to sustain the lives of children’s creations? What creative decisions do these playthings actually allow children to make? The paper examines these questions to consider how tech toys position children’s play today.