On Sunday, Bart Simon gave a talk entitled “Boyhood Spaces: Play and Social Navigation through Video Games by Shanly Dixon and Bart Simon. It was one of my favourite talks and he is an excellent speaker as he incorporated space and place concepts. The abstract of his talk is available here.

Along with other scholars investigating children’s relationship with new media forms and technologies (Buckingham 2000, Flynn 2003, Ito 2004, Jenkins 1998, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002, Mc Namee 2000, Sefton-Green 1998, Walkerdine 1998), we wish to create an analytical space for the investigation of the role of video games in the mediation and production of kinds of postmodern childhood. Drawing on our ethnographic study of a small group of boys playing console games over several months, this paper argues against a view of digital game space in terms of disjunctive other, parallel or virtual worlds (e.g. Foucault’s heterotopias). Instead, we wish to propose a model of children’s play that acknowledges the hybrid, fluid and continuous nature of game spaces with the other social, imaginative and physical spaces the players may occupy.

He spoke about whether other spaces exist during game play for boys. His student (Shanly) observed boys playing video games to better understand how they played the game. What they determined is that “playing the game” may not have anything to do with the game.