(Mine)crafting custom: collecting children's folklore in a digital age

Folklore Reimagined

This 10-Minute Talk is part of our Folklore Reimagined season, which explores the connections folklore forges between us and communities of the past, and how these customs and cultures are presented today.

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Transcript

We work on a British Academy project called Childhoods and Play, exploring children’s play and folklore. Our work starts from the assumption that children are beings not just ‘becomings’. As scholars of childhood, we recognise children as individuals with agency, and as a folk group with their own customs and traditions. This was also the approach of folklorists such as the Iona and Peter Opie, who documented children’s peer cultures, play and traditions, including calendar customs and seasonal festivals, from the 1950s onwards, in children’s own words.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked on a research that taught us about children's digital play and wellbeing, which is called 'The Play Observatory'.

Many seasonal customs and festive traditions in the UK, seem to be centred on children. Christmas is a prime example of a festival scholars identify as increasingly about celebrating family and especially children. For children, Christmas is perceived as a magical time with gifts brought by their own supernatural visitor - Santa or Father Christmas.

Families also practise ritualised playful traditions, like the tooth fairy, which let adults and children play together while rewarding children. Children, though, don’t always have the agency adults do to shape traditions. The adult-orchestrated traditions they are socialised into draw on social constructions of children as precious and vulnerable, or more negatively as a danger.

We can see this in how adults approach Halloween - a time when children may go out without adults trick or treating - with concerns that children are begging, that treats could be tampered with (a classic urban legend), or that children could even be prey to supernatural forces behind the make believe.

The pandemic was a perfect storm of adult anxieties about children’s vulnerability: That the closing of schools and play spaces during lockdowns, and social distancing would cause children’s play and socialisation to suffer, cut off from friends, classmates and wider family. One cause of anxiety was children missing out on traditional celebrations - a time for family, friends, activities in and outside the home, and gift giving.

Our Play Observatory project between Sheffield and UCL, though, observed a pivot towards the digital as children met online to play and mark time. Challenging ideas of digital play as passive, our research gave us the chance to appreciate ways in which children are active, proactive, creative and collegiate, part of folk groups creating their own hybrid societies on digital platforms and in online worlds. This offered a fascinating opportunity to explore how children imagine festivals in their own terms: what units of lore did they appropriate and reimagine, and what did they discard; who did they invite in?

We’re now going to share examples of children’s online ritual play during the pandemic emphasising that online spaces are sites of folkloric performance and conceiving of game players as a folk group.

A Minecraft 'backup' Christmas

In the run up to Christmas 2020, various states of lockdown existed across the U.K. Many traditional events were cancelled, and a lot of Christmas gift-buying moved online. Despite many politicians taking the time to reassure children around the world that Father Christmas was indeed a key worker, many children worried that on the morning of 25 December, Christmas, in the form of presents from Santa, might fail to arrive.

One contributor to the Play Observatory was a resourceful 10-year-old boy, whom we will call Levi. He decided not to take any chances and created his own ‘backup Christmas’ in Minecraft to share with his family. He created a world of fir trees and snowy mountains in which to locate this alternative Christmas and built a cosy Christmas house. Inside the house he constructed a Christmas tree, topped with a gold lantern.

Flanking the tree he placed two large wooden chests. Free-standing signs in front of each chest one labelled them as belonging to Levi and his sister respectively. Together the chests and signs provided a way to honour the tradition of presents beneath the tree. As wrapping individual gifts isn’t possible in Minecraft, concealing them within the chests kept them hidden from sight, to be uncovered once the chests were opened on Christmas morning.

Inside each chest Levi curated personalised collections of gifts, drawn from the resources of the Minecraft universe and reflecting each child’s interests and preferences. As well as precious stones and metals (in their favourite colours), he has provided useful equipment such as tools, clothing and potions, and books for entertainment.

Minecraft is a game based on a first-person view of the world and with their PS4 and controllers on Christmas morning Levi and his sister were able to enter this backup Christmas world and shape their interactions within it - with the presents and with each other.

You might wonder if there were any presents for the parents of the family. Well the parents were indeed inside the Christmas house – present as Minecraft villagers.

And those of you who have played Minecraft will probably darkly appreciate this. Villager status in Minecraft casts the parents as non-playing side characters. Villagers do not have agency within Minecraft, but it is possible for players to exchange goods with villagers via a trade.

Constructing his parents as villagers firmly positions them as background characters who are witnesses to Christmas but not main protagonists in it. And when you think about how Christmas operates in offline spaces, this seems to be a particular suitable analogy.

However, casting his parents as villagers actually took a great deal of care and effort. Villagers are tricky and prone to wandering off and to avoid this he had to name them. Levi is dyslexic he reported that naming and getting the parents to stay in the house, quote ‘pained me actually’.

Ritual digital and media play

Our second example took place during May 2021, when social distancing was in effect in England. These restrictions coincided with the time when two brothers, both with autism, celebrated their birthdays just two days apart. Consequently, their usual parent-organised birthday activities, a trip to the cinema, and a party and cake with wider family members, were off the table.

Instead, the boys and their two friends who regularly play Minecraft together decided to organise a party or rather a birthday festival as the eldest child, who was turning 15, styled it on their shared server. Their plans were not shared with adults in the household!

Their collaborative Minecraft world had expanded rapidly during the pandemic. At this point it consisted of two major ‘Empires’: the Bread Empire, with its capital Breadburg, and the Pig Empire. Usually at war, hostilities were paused for the party. The players co-built a birthday landscape taking advantage of Minecraft’s affordances and seemingly limitless space. A festival space was split into activity ‘zones’ and they also designed decorations, building a visual statement that this is a double birthday celebration. The new ages of the players marking their birthdays took centre stage either side of the Bread national flag.

The older boy explained that first they had a disco, and ate cake and cookies in Minecraft. Then they played minigames: parkour, trampolining, and an obstacle course designed by a friend where the rules dictated that you die at the end. Finally, everyone received a commemorative festival outfit kitbox, and the guests enjoyed a tour of Breadburg.

Digital and media play wasn’t always confined to online spaces either, with children typically blurring the boundary between on and offline worlds. For example, some children decorated pictures of Minecraft Spawn Eggs and put them in their window for Easter during lockdown. Other children drew on their media interests, such as Star Wars, to design their own cloth face masks made by family members.

These examples, of children’s festive or ritual digital and media play, demonstrate what happens when adults step back. This self-initiated play shows children as active problem solvers in their families, rather than passive victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, children remade custom and ritual informed by offline practices, dropping elements they had no use for, and incorporating and reimagining those they found meaningful, comfortable and empowering. This was particularly important for neurodivergent children, allowing them to centre their needs and take part in activities they might struggle to in offline places.

Our research offers opportunities to further explore how children imagine ritual and festival, and to consider whether these pandemic practices will persist in a post pandemic world.

We hope our research has shown you how digital spaces can be positive for children and perhaps leaves you intrigued enough to investigate what the children in your life are creating in their play and celebration.

Dr Yinka Olusoga is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield. Dr Catherine Bannister is a visiting researcher in the School of Education at The University of Sheffield.