GAMIFIED SELVES: TRAUMA, PLAY, AND COMING OF AGE IN "ENDER’S GAME" AND "READY PLAYER ONE"
GAMIFIED SELVES: TRAUMA, PLAY, AND COMING OF AGE IN "ENDER’S GAME" AND "READY PLAYER ONE"

Summary/Abstract: The complex landscapes of games, narratives, culture and pedagogy, have never been more important in an interconnected and digitalized environment. This article contends that play works not as distraction or evasion per se but rather as a vital storytelling and identity constructing tool for trauma, cultural memory, and adolescence. Alternatively, online and virtual play spaces serve as sites for monitoring morality, exploring identity, and shifting from passive voyeurism to active participation both in the self and within the world. As such, just as playing—whether “real” or “cyber”—has become the dramatic metaphor for growing up in a gamified world. We will look at what role the motif of the game and play plays as a central metaphorical and structural fundament for the processes through which young protagonists in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One shape their identity and act in digitally mediated environments.

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