Assembling literacies in virtual play

Virtual worlds provide opportunities for new kinds of interaction and new forms of play and learning, and they are rapidly becoming a common feature of the lives of many children and young people. This chapter explores the digital writing and textual activity that circulates around this virtual play and the issues that it raises for both researchers and educators. Drawing on work from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives we look at the ways in which the virtual is embedded in everyday meaning making and indicate important new directions for future research. In doing this we trace some possible relationships between writing and virtual play and consider how to engage with notions of authorship, particularly given the fuzzy boundaries between human and non-human activity. We propose that encountering such activity with a mood of ‘enchantment’ (Bennett, 2001) enables researchers and practitioners to approach moments of writing as fluid human/non-human assemblings and in doing so more fully appreciate the complexity and potentiality of virtual play.