Playing Minecraft: Young children’s postdigital play

Abstract

New sociomaterial and performative directions in literacy research on digital technologies and play in early childhoods may complicate the established concept of digital play. This study contributes to this line of research by empirically expanding on the concept of the postdigital. In the study, postdigital refers to how both “digital” and “non-digital” agentic materialities are allowed to act messily in contemporary early childhood play, unsettling the notion of the digital as a discrete category. By analyzing a case of two five-year-old children playing Minecraft with wooden and synthetic blocks in a preschool common room within an agential realist framework, we find that a postdigital play practice is performed through playful, sociomaterial configurations of “joining,” “building,” and “not running out of things.”