The Philadelphia Enquirer has an interesting article today entitled "Girls abandon dolls for web-based toys." The story describes how increasingly youngsters are spending more of their play time online in toy-based virtual worlds such as Stardoll.com and Barbie's EverythingGirl.com, instead of, or alongside their more traditional doll play.
Some youth development specialists wonder if this decrease in doll play for young girls is robbing them of important role-playing and imagination exercises that dolls provide. Others see this as the general trend of children doing adult-type activities earlier and earlier.
As young people spend more and more of their play time on these corporate online worlds, I have to wonder if this a good thing, and what we as adults should doing about it.
As a child I played with dolls, stuffed animals, and then later action figures and playsets, both alone and with my sister and friends. My sister and I had entire worlds mapped out, with various characters connected to each other with elaborate and complex relationships, that we reenacted through our dolls and stuffed animals. It played out almost entirely in our minds and had almost no connection to any toy manufacturer or marketer's narrative or messaging.
We also watched a lot of television as latchkey kids, and listened to the radio and watched a lot of movies. But those two worlds of mass media and play time were not very connected for us. There was no rich, multi-media tie-ins of products, games, television shows, movies, and more that you find with modern toy brands like Barbie or Yo-gi-go.
Which I guess is my question: Do these online toy-based worlds provide the kind of youth development experiences that will prepare our young people to be successful, creative, social and smart adults, in the way that traditional play does? Or are they preparing young people to be passive consumers of content and goods?
I guess it depends on which worlds your child is spending his or her time in. There are worlds that provide more opportunities for unguided play and creativity and ones that are just another form of crass marketing. I'm less concerned about a girl hanging out with her guild online to plan their next raid or a boy creating art and sharing it with his friends, than I am about the mindless collection of virtual points or goods. But the latter seems to be the norm rather than the former, when it comes to youth-focused virtual worlds.
Enabling parents to be smart consumers of these worlds is one answer. Groups like Common Sense Media have whole departments devoted to games and online worlds, with reviews and suggestions for parents. Often parents don't have the time to invest in exploring these different worlds to see what their child is experiencing, or where they might be going.
But like food choices, if there is only a candy aisle and a cookie aisle in the online marketplace, there isn't much a parent can do, other than forbid their child to go online.
Which brings us to the role of the government.
The Children's Television Act of 1990 requires that all television broadcast stations devote a certain number of hours of programming a week to youth educational shows. Failure to provide these hours could result in a broadcaster losing his license. While there are definitely problems with how these rules have been enforced over the years by the FCC, it has certainly resulted in a lot of worthwhile television content being available that probably would not be in a completely open marketplace.
I wonder if we are at a time when the FCC should consider whether we need a regulatory framework to govern youth-oriented virtual worlds, to ensure that America's young people have access to rich online content and experiences that prepare them for being active digital citizens in the 21st century.
Or do we just let the market decide and hope for the best?
