"Sometimes I Like Killing as a Treat": Children's Transgressive Play in Minecraft

This study examines how six- to eight-year-old children play Minecraft, drawing on recordings from ten families totaling 10.5 hours of play sessions. Its central argument is that digital free-play research has concentrated on media effects and developmental outcomes while neglecting in-situ observation of what children actually do with games. Most observed play matched established taxonomies such as creative and socio-dramatic play, but the authors identified a category of unprovoked violent play that existing frameworks could not accommodate, which they term "Transgressive Play": pleasure derived from breaking moral and social norms in a space where no one faces real physical harm.

The paper's core evidence is a detailed case study of a seven-year-old who repeatedly killed non-threatening villager characters and a zombie in Creative mode while his younger brother watched and laughed. The authors show that this behavior does not fit Hughes' play-type framework, particularly Rough and Tumble Play and Deep Play, because it lacks a shared, two-way contest and carries no risk to the player. The analysis also highlights a gap between parental framings of Minecraft as an educational, non-violent game and the transgressive uses children make of it, underscoring children's agency in shaping their own play.

The authors further argue that Minecraft functions as a free-play environment rather than a structured game, and that the concept of Transgressive Play extends Hughes' notion of Deep Play. A key finding concerns the child's narrative, which shifted depending on whether his mother was present, suggesting that children use play to negotiate emerging moral awareness and cultural expectations. The paper's scope is necessarily narrow, grounded in a small qualitative sample, and it positions its contribution as descriptive and exploratory rather than generalizable.