UC Irvine

The playground is a space where play is encouraged and happens most freely. Online communities can be imagined as playgrounds. In addition to face-to-face playgrounds, these “online playgrounds” mediate the embodied experience, but in a different way. In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), to better understand play, I shift the focus from using technology to assist children with disabilities engage in normative play, to using technology that supports children’s play—whether normative or not. Work in other fields upholds normative, face-to-face interactions as the goal in any social interaction. Current research often holds offline and online as two distinct experiences with many caregivers, teachers, parents, and researchers privileging the experiences that happen in the physical, face-to-face realm—the physical-world playground. In HCI, studying technology for play is often acknowledged only to accomplish specific goals (such as education, skill mastery, or improving health). When stakeholders use technology for play simply for the sake of play, normative interactions are the focal point, such as with able-bodied children. In technology research, children with disabilities are not ignored altogether, but rather when technology for play is studied for disabled children the technology becomes an aid—a support to allow the children more normative interactions. Being disabled inherently means not fitting into and not adhering to the normative embodied interactions. When we assume a normative way of engaging as the best or only way to interact, there will be people who are excluded. In a digital ethnography conducted in Autcraft, an online community centered around a Minecraft world for children with autism, we can see how online communities can become “online playgrounds” and used as an alternative place to play. This dissertation aims to re-center technology design to support topos-mediated ludic sociality—the various ways sociality as an embodied experience is mediated by playful place—rather than focusing on how technology can be used to normalize social interactions.