Digital Play: Children’s Rights, Risks and Responsibilities
摘要
Digital technologies in the form of gaming, social media and video platforms have created new forms of play that appeal to children. Children are avid users of such services, and they offer them numerous opportunities for playful online pastimes that contribute to their development. They learn all kinds of new skills, can express their creativity and socialise with others. However, online play can be harmful for children in the ways they were designed. Obsessive online play, for example, can lead to health problems, social conflict in families and educational disadvantage. There can also be economic damage through manipulative marketing and sales strategies. Depending on their design, online modes of play can, therefore, both contribute to and interfere with children’s rights. A common thread here is that online modalities of play are often not specifically designed or developed for children. Children’s rights are, therefore, almost never central to their design. Moreover, games or other forms of digital play are usually offered as commercial digital products and services. This chapter analyses the ways in which children’s right to play interacts with other children’s rights in modes of digital play to demonstrate how the extent of the right to play, as originally intended in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is respected.