Gaming as Part of Children’s Semiotic Repertoires: A Postdigital Perspective
摘要
This chapter examines children’s gaming practices through a postdigital lens, highlighting their role as complex, multimodal semiotic repertoires that both shape and reflect young people’s life trajectories and identities. Moving beyond a narrow, game-centered focus, it calls for a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that accounts for the socio-cultural, political, and institutional contexts influencing gaming behaviors in contemporary society. Drawing on survey data from 912 Greek children aged 11–18, the study explores how local educational ideologies, gender, academic performances, socioeconomic differences, and access to digital infrastructure affect gaming preferences and practices. Building on the notions of repertoires and translanguaging, the authors introduce the concepts of transgaming, and transemiotic pedagogy, positioning them as innovative pedagogical tools for leveraging children’s varied semiotic resources and identities in inclusive, child-centered education. This perspective advocates starting from children’s existing linguistic and gaming repertoires, respecting their biographical and contextual diversity, and fostering critical engagement with digital literacies. The chapter underscores the importance of acknowledging local specificities and the broader socio-technical systems shaping digital play and learning, while calling for further research to refine these concepts across different cultural and educational contexts.