Brierley-Beare, Amy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0675-3268 (2026) “Are babies worth it?”: Mediated Representations of Children in Digital Gaming. In: Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Australia 2026, 16 December 2025, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.

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Abstract

Infants and children are both mechanically and idealogically challenging subjects when represented in gaming. How real-world children and infants play and engage with digital texts has been explored thoroughly (Hamlen 2011; Ferguson & Olson 2013; Bassiouni & Hackley 2014) but despite their varied and distinct forms, presentations of younger humans and humanoid figures are relatively understudied. Emma Reay (2021; 2024) has written extensively about how children are presented ingaming and discusses the roles children play more broadly in these interactive texts. Reay has identified many of the roles children take on in gaming—including as heroes, martyrs, killers—and notes that the figure of ‘the child’ as they put is a “‘lightning rod’ for political and cultural controversy” (Reay 2021). Beyond this, how infants are depicted is usually tied to gestation and breeding (Gallagher 2025) or part of a broader content analysis exploring frequency of representation (Williams et. al. 2009; Jones et. al. 2025). Building from Reay’s work I want to further illuminate some of the ways games present children—in particular infants—to players. More specifically I want to explore the cultural, political, and sociloigcal implications of what I term a ‘mediated child’—ie. a child that has not been explicitly created by a player but rather is the result of previous character creation input mediated through a system that determines a new output.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	Published
Subjects:	A General Works > AC Collections. Series. Collected works A General Works > AI Indexes (General) A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BH Aesthetics H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/15066

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