Sandbox Summit: Toy action figures, transmedia and the future of play

Sandbox Summit is a “series of conferences designed to address how technology affects the ways kids play, learn, and connect.” Or, as the tagline for this year’s summit “iPlay YouPlay WiiPlay” says: “How play is changing media and media is changing play.” The summit was held last week at MIT’s Media Lab.

I’ve excerpted some choice bits from a post by attendees below. The whole thing is definitely worth a read.

Toy action figures, transmedia and the future of play:

The first day of the Summit kicked off with the father of Transmedia, Professor Henry Jenkins. Transmedia is storytelling across multiple forms of media with each element making distinctive contributions to a viewer’s understanding of the story world.

Jenkins explains that this type of integrated storytelling has been used since the 19th century. This tradition has continued with children using action figures, not to re-enact the stories they have passively consumed but to actively borrow the characters as a means to project their own ideas in the form of physical avatars. Jenkins argues that the recasting of action figures in this type of play contributes to the creation of new mythologies.

Although Jenkins emphasized that action figures spawned the creative and multi-faceted Transmedia movement, some presenters on the panel “Real Toys for an Increasingly Virtual World” were skeptical of overly designed or specified toys in fostering a child’s creativity.  Marina Bers, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Child Development Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Sciences, Tufts University, asked conference attendees to consider how we define a toy in the first place. Barry Kudrowitz, who started MIT’s Toy Lab at MIT, jumped in to say that there is a distinction between toys and toy products (when someone puts affordances around play or assigns play to a particular product).

Mattias, and much of the audience seemed to agree, that children have an irrepressible spontaneity for play that even in a hyper cultivated culture or environment, cannot be smothered. Children will continue to manipulate the toy as they see fit and to fit those toys into their own mythologies, as Jenkins suggested.

How do you see the future of toy design? As children’s toys seem to be more pre-packaged, do you think this will hinder children’s imagination or challenge our children to hack and transform their toys to convey their concepts?