This book illuminates the lived experience of a group of primary school children engaged in virtual world play during a year-long after-school club. It will be of interest and value to researchers of children’s play, as well as those who explore visual methods and design multimodal research outputs.

This book illuminates the lived experience of a group of primary school children engaged in virtual world play during a year-long after-school club. Shaped by post-structuralist theory and New Literacy Studies, it outlines a playful, participatory and emergent methodological approach, referred to as ‘rhizomic ethnography’. This ‘hybrid’ text uses both words and images to describe the fieldsite and the methodology, demonstrating how children’s creation of a digital community through Minecraft was shaped by the both the game and their wider social and cultural experiences. Through the exploration of various dimensions of the club, including visual and soundscape data, the author demonstrates the ‘emergent dimension of play’. It will be of interest and value to researchers of children’s play, as well as those who explore visual methods and design multimodal research outputs.Chris Bailey is Senior Lecturer in Education at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Hisaward-winning research explores play, literacies, affective lived experience of space and place, and participatory methods in research and communication.

“This is a dazzling account of digital literacies, multimodality and videogame play in an after-school Minecraft club… The brilliant drawings throughout, including the use of an illustrated comic, offer the reader an outstanding example of visual methods in action. This highly innovative book makes an important contribution to the field and is essential reading for all those interested in new literacies, videogame play and visual methods.” —Professor Jackie Marsh, University of Sheffield, UK “Children, in Bailey’s research, display visceral, felt engagements with sheep, songs, and swords in Minecraft; what is more, he manages to give researchers ways to appreciate and navigate the art of visual research along the way…This is a deeply personal book that gives readers a strong sense of how virtual worlds give children room to think, feel, and extract from a life.” —Professor Jennifer M K Rowsell, University of Bristol, UK

Illustrates how children engage in virtual world play. Establishes a methodological approach, rhizomic ethnography. Examines how the creation of a digital community is influenced by both in-game factors and wider social and cultural experiences