ABSTRACT
This chapter examines children’s toys as a site of convergence where play literacies bring together imagination, materials, actions, and spaces. Playing with transmedia in digital spaces juxtaposes paying and playing in ways that conflate who and what is being pretended, consumed, created, and moved across multiple products, contexts, roles, and bodies. Commercial, imaginative, and social practices tangle bodies, play, and toys, moving across the immediate spaces of children’s worlds and global multimedia sites and networks that distribute consumer goods over vast distances. Educational approaches to play have often reflected a classed preference away from popular culture and mass-market toys, toward more expensive, natural, non-commercial materials. As children play games on transmedia websites, they may encounter marketing such as retail links to manufacturer’s products or product launch advertising in the form of announcements of new characters. Transmedia websites offer retail shopping with wishlist and shopping cart options to order toys and merchandise, either directly from the manufacturer or from online retailers.
