ABSTRACT
Children differ substantially in their engagement with information and communication technologies (ICT) – what they use it for, how much they use it and how important it is to them. Successive waves of moral panic continuously link the changing nature of young people's lives with an increase in the provision of media technology in the previously enclosed and protected domains of the family and the school. Much has been made of the potentiality of ICTs to change the geography of childhood – altering where childhood is actually lived. The globalising tendencies of the computer were, they found, evidenced in a number of different ways, some of them familiar and some particular to the medium itself. In an important sense then, playing computer games is in no way unique; rather, gaming is embedded in a world of a highly commercial global entertainment that can be accessed through a wide range of popular media.
