In the field of children’s media studies, the relationship between toys and media is a frequent topic of discussion. When studying kids’ television, for example, it is impossible to ignore just how blurred the boundaries can get between programming, advertising and merchandising. Since the 1980s, children’s media increasingly serves a flagship function for whole cross-promotional matrices of toys, products, licensing agreements and spin-off media. Accordingly, there’s a growing body of literature examining how the commercialization of kids’ media (and toys) has lead to a substantive transformation within children’s culture. When toys bring this amount of narrative and commercial baggage into the playroom, it is bound to have some influence on how children play.

A number of scholars argue that today’s level of coordination between media content and licensed toys promotes a form of narrativized or “branded” play, which sees children reproducing in their play the scripts and parameters (characters and plot devices, for example) provided by media texts. This transfer is found to occur not only when kids play with toys directly associated with media text, but during fantasy play as well. For example, kids are likely to re-enact a Star Wars narrative while playing with their Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia action figures, but they are also likely to role-play these same characters during an afternoon of “make-believe”. While there is still a lot of disagreement about the nature and effect of this transfer, it appears that children are more likely to conform to these play “scripts” the more they are provided with prescribed narratives (i.e. media texts) and pre-defined props (i.e. toys, play sets, etc.).

My own research into children’s media focuses primarily on digital media technologies. As with traditional media forms, kids’ digital media are heavily characterised by commercialization and cross-media “synergy”. The most popular kids’ sites are often cross-promotional vehicles for larger media-brands, such as CartoonNetwork.com, Barbie.com and Disney.com. Children’s videogames often feature popular media characters (e.g. Pokémon) and storylines (e.g. games based on feature films). In many ways, the processes observed within the traditional media are considerably facilitated by digital technologies. Here we find a seamless integration of once distinct business practices like entertainment, advertising, market research and e-commerce. Furthermore, within the context of digital technologies, play becomes inescapably subject to the scripts, props and rules that are pre-programmed into the technological design of that particular program or application.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about LEGO and Star Wars, though not necessarily in that order. The Star Wars franchise has played a pivotal role in the evolution of the commercialized children's play culture, primarily by way of its highly-innovative thirty-year engagement with licensing and merchandising. The films have supplied an endless array of characters, creatures, vehicles and starships upon which toys, action figures, LEGO building sets, and videogames continue to be based. Just as Strawberry Shortcake (one of the first television series to be entirely constructed around a line of toys and accessories) forever changed the face of television, Star Wars is often credited as the film that forever re-set the bar for cross-promotional and transnationally-synergized children’s media-brands everywhere.

When I think about media-branding and narrativized play, I can imagine few toys less commercialized and prescribed than my childhood stash of LEGO bricks. For over two years, playing LEGO was by far the central preoccupation of my life (after which they would forever be replaced by computer games). The only rules in LEGO were material (what pieces could and could not fit together), familial (I had to share with siblings and clean up all the pieces when I as done) and self-imposed (higher was always better). Although I do distinctly remember using LEGO to build houses for my She-Ra dolls, LEGO was otherwise completely free of media-branding, narrative scripts or cross-references to other products. Since then, however, LEGO has increasingly emphasized cross-licensing, through numerous promotional partnerships with popular children’s media-brands. The most successful partnership by far has been an ongoing collaboration with Lucasfilm and the creation of LEGO Star Wars.

Where LEGO and Star Wars come together, a straightforward case study for understanding the changing world of children’s play emerges. The first Star Wars-themed LEGO kits were introduced in 1999 as a way to promote the cinema re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy. New kits were then released during the lead-up to the opening of each new film of the prequel trilogy, featuring ships and “scenes” from each upcoming instalment. As with other LEGO model kits, the Star Wars kits differ from regular LEGO in that they are specifically designed to produce a particular finished object – that is, they come with a blueprint. Their pieces are highly specialized. While kids are more than able to re-appropriate the pieces into unstructured LEGO play and personal creations, the imagery, instructions and tone of the kit’s advertising and packaging clearly promote the idea of a prescribed function.

This function, invariably, is to use the LEGO pieces to create a specific “prop” that directly references the Star Wars narrative: the X-Wing that Luke used to destroy the Death Star, or Jabba’s Palace where Leia was held captive. Like so many media-branded toys, the LEGO Star Wars kits also promote a culture of accumulation wherein each kit represents just one component in a larger series. The “complete” play experience can only be achieved when all the kits in a series are brought (i.e. bought) together, and all the props required to re-play the films are readily on hand. Thus, as elements of a popular media-brand (Star Wars) are integrated into children’s toys (LEGO) and play (playing LEGO), the play experience is significantly transformed.

With the expansion of LEGO Star Wars into the realm of videogames and other digital media, the collaboration between these two icons of children’s culture has become a media-brand in its own right. The brand has already spawned two highly successful console games, Lego Star Wars: The Video Game and Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy, a vibrant online community, a series of popular webisodes, and an online comic strip. Similar to the media-branded LEGO kits, these digital incarnations promote a form of narrativized or branded play that—while encouraging kids on the one hand to interact, appropriate, and manipulate its contents—ultimately requires players to submit to an increasingly pre-determined and rationalized set of parameters and thematic motifs.

As LEGO becomes digitized, it is once again transformed into a significantly more controlled and commercialized form of play. For instance, as LEGO pieces become video-game objects, their creative potential is reduced to the pre-programmed set of options that are available within the context (and coding) of the game. While everything is “made” of LEGO in Lego Star Wars II, this is primarily an aesthetic conceit. During regular play, opportunities to interact with the objects as LEGO pieces are somewhat limited to smashing certain pre-existing objects and “building” (a task that is automatically accomplished by pressing down on a single button) pre-determined solutions to scheduled obstacles.

Of course, digital technologies are also providing kids with immensely rich opportunities for play, creativity, learning, and social interaction. The possibilities for kids to enjoy increased cultural participation and just plain have fun through these technological forms can seem almost endless, with more emerging every day. What I see happening again and again within kids’ digital culture, however, is a chillingly effective enclosure of these opportunities in favour of commercial interests. While these processes are hardly new, they have gained an unprecedented momentum and fluidity within digital media technologies that neither parents nor public policies are currently prepared for. As for the children themselves, I hope that my ongoing research in this area can eventually provide some insight into how the rationalization and commercialization of kids’ culture that is occurring within the digital environment impacts upon their opportunities for agency, creative engagement, and above all play.