Boys' Play in the Fourth Space: Freedom of Movement in a Tween Virtual World

Searle and Kafai's study examines how preadolescent boys, aged roughly 10 to 12, play in Whyville.net, a virtual world with about 1.5 million registered users. Its central argument is that virtual worlds offer boys a "freedom of movement" comparable to the open-ended play Henry Jenkins describes in console games, but with a stronger emphasis on social interaction and avatar design. Rather than following a fixed storyline or end goal, players create their own paths through the environment, which allows them to experiment with gendered behaviors they might otherwise encounter only on the physical playground.

The research draws on logfile data from 595 players as well as observations of an after-school gaming club of 21 tweens. Across this material, chat, y-mail, and avatar-related activities emerged as the most frequent boy pursuits. Three case studies of core, semi-core, and peripheral players illustrate how engagement with the world shifts over time, while closer analysis of individual boys shows that projectile throwing and scamming were used to test masculine identities and social norms. Projectile play frequently provoked teasing and homophobic responses from peers, revealing the boundaries of acceptable masculinity within the community.

The authors conclude that gender meaningfully shapes boys' play, but that individual expertise and self-set goals also influence behavior, a nuance that quantitative methods alone would have missed. A key finding is that boys could adopt a transgressive "bad boy" persona without real-world consequences, recreating rough-and-tumble chase games and other gendered playground traditions in a digital setting. The authors also caution that their findings capture a single moment in time, since the social meanings of activities such as projectile throwing are likely to change as the platform and its community evolve.