Digital Playgrounds makes the argument that online games play a uniquely meaningful role in children’s lives, with profound implications for children’s culture, agency, and rights in the digital era.

Sara M. Grimes is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.

"Grimes takes a deep and important dive into the politics embedded in online playgrounds. This outstanding book is a must-read for privacy scholars, child-rights activists, and anyone interested in understanding how tech companies shape children’s lives."

Daniel Thomas Cook, Professor of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University:
"With Digital Playgrounds, Sara Grimes deftly cuts through the often simplistic and sanctimonious rhetoric surrounding children’s digital play-worlds to offer a compelling framework with which to understand the interwoven threads of technology, politics and culture that comprise children’s connected play. The result is well-composed, invaluable resource for anyone seeking to grasp the complex intermingling of gaming industry interests, and technological affordances with children’s virtual play practices, rights and creativity.”

Jackie Marsh, Professor of Education, University of Sheffield:
“This outstanding book offers a comprehensive and critical examination of children’s online play spaces, virtual worlds, and connected games. Sara Grimes provides an authoritative account of how digital play has much in common with traditional playground play, but also offers crucial insights into some of the differences in relation to issues such as privacy, censorship, ownership, and commercialization. This is a landmark book that will undoubtedly be the ‘go-to’ text in the years ahead for all those interested in the political landscape of children’s digital play.”

Sonia Livingstone, Professor of Social Psychology, London School of Economics and Political Science:
“The importance of play, and indeed, children’s right to play, has been long recognised. Yet in practice, play is increasingly curtailed, controlled and contested, especially online. In her meticulously researched book, Grimes dissects how we reached such a problematic situation and, importantly, how we might move forward so as to enable children’s playful possibilities in a digital world.”