Children’s play is undergoing a profound transformation in a world increasingly shaped by algorithmic infrastructures. No longer confined to physical spaces or open-ended exploration, today’s play journeys are routed through opaque recommendation systems that curate stories, games, and peers according to commercial logic. What once fostered imagination and serendipity is now entangled in platforms that gamify interactions, influence tastes, and weave childhood experience into data-driven ecosystems.
At the heart of this transformation lies the architecture of algorithmic infrastructures. Research with young users shows how platforms like TikTok or YouTube Kids not only mediate choices but actively shape habits, preferences, and social bonds. Feeds become curated playgrounds where children’s agency is subtly engineered—reflecting not neutrality, but corporate interests.
Compounding this, we confront the datafication of childhood. Connected toys, wearables, and apps turn children into both data subjects and profitable data sources. Echoing Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism, children’s playful interactions now feed predictive analytics systems that anticipate and monetize their desires, reinforcing asymmetries of power and diminishing spaces for genuine, autonomous play.
Meanwhile, gamification strategies—such as points, badges, and infinite scroll designs—blur the lines between play, work, and consumption. Although they boost engagement, they also risk creating compulsive loops and fostering exploitative forms of participation, raising urgent ethical concerns around persuasive and addictive technologies.
In parallel, algorithmic personalization fosters polarization rather than just entertainment. Personalized feeds often create “echo chambers” that isolate children in homogeneous bubbles of opinion and taste. Surveys across Europe and North America show increasing parental concern about how these dynamics challenge civic dialogue, empathy, and coexistence, leading regulatory bodies like Ofcom to recommend interventions to mitigate divisive content exposure.
This algorithmic environment also heightens risks of exposure to hate, misogyny, and bias. Empirical studies reveal how quickly recommendation systems can escalate from benign content to extreme narratives, amplifying harmful discourses among adolescents. Simultaneously, the automated systems designed to moderate hate speech often replicate biases of race and gender, creating a double bind where marginalized voices are silenced even as harms proliferate.
The impact on mental health and privacy is equally profound. Teenagers themselves report links between heavy social-media use and challenges such as sleep disruption, anxiety, and declining self-esteem. Efforts by schools and parents to monitor and mitigate these risks—often through AI surveillance tools—introduce further tensions, raising fresh questions about trust, autonomy, and digital rights in educational and domestic spaces.
In response to these complex challenges, scholars call for a shift towards critical algorithmic literacy and reparative digital design. Instead of merely protecting young users through surveillance or restrictions, participatory approaches aim to empower them to interrogate and reshape the very infrastructures that mediate their digital lives. Such frameworks advocate for inclusive, plural, and rights-respecting online spaces that children and youth can co-create alongside educators, caregivers, designers, and policymakers.
This mid-term conference invites contributions that engage with these intertwined issues—algorithmic infrastructures, datafication, gamification, polarization, hate, mental health, critical literacy, and participatory design. We seek to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that advances our understanding of how play, pleasure, and participation are being fundamentally reconfigured under algorithmic conditions. We welcome submissions from scholars, educators, activists, designers, and practitioners working across media studies, childhood and youth studies, education, digital culture, AI, and ethics.
Key Topics (include but are not limited to):
- Algorithmic influence on play, imagination, and autonomy
- Media and information literacy in algorithmic environments: challenges and pedagogies
- Artificial intelligence and data: ethical tensions, transparency and children’s rights
- Platform design and children’s play behavior
- Branded content in youth media cultures: commercial influence and participatory formats
- Gamification and its educational/ethical implications
- Surveillance and datafication of children’s leisure
- Creative resistance: how children subvert algorithmic norms
- Play, inclusion and marginalization in digital spaces
- Digital well-being and psychological implications of algorithm-driven play
- Educational tools to foster critical play and media literacy
- Regulation, parental mediation and institutional responses
- This conference prioritizes in-person participation. All accepted presentations will be delivered onsite, fostering direct interaction, collaboration and networking. However, the Doctoral Colloquium on 17 October will exceptionally offer a hybrid participation option for PhD students, allowing for remote presentations in justified cases.
