MineCrafting Friendship

Based on a phenomenological inspired fieldwork of children (aged 7 to 11) playing Minecraft and producing, showing and sharing experiences through YouTube this paper explores how children engage, and relate through the activities. Focus is on sociability and playful association (Simmel, 1997), as the study investigate the relatations made around the play activities. The children are shouting, they are building, they kill zombies, while they are sharing with others, learning from others, teasing others, helping others etc. They are engaging in their play practices and creating play moods (Karoff, 2013) that forms the basis for striking up friendships within the context of playing Minecraft and producing/consuming Mindcraft metatexts via YouTube. The investigation shows that children perform different types of friendships in the combination of Minecraft and Youtube. The analysis expose two dominant types of friends: “The generous Friend” and “The naughty Friend”. Both of these draw on the Greek understanding of friendship as a combination of “to receive” and “to follow”(Huber, 2006). For Aristoteles friendship, can lead to a better way of doing and thinking, and for Platon the dialogue between friends can even lead to a higher understanding of yourself. The combination Minecraft/YouTube shows forms of friendship that underline the importance of showing, sharing and caring, and show how this unfolds across media, stories and materialities. The theoretical point of departure for the study is the mood perspective (Karoff, 2013). The mood perspective is a conceptualisation of playing activities, where children ́s playing activities are seen as valuable (Heidegger, 1998; Prout & James, 1997; Schmidt, 2011) and with the aim of creating play moods – together (Simmel, 1997).