More-than-human and more-than-digital collecting among young children in Norway

ABSTRACT This study aims to advance our understanding of young children’s contemporary collecting. Collecting is a prevalent practice among young children. However, extant research typically highlights children of school age and emphasizes functions and motives of collecting, but rarely considers the relevant affective dimensions. Furthermore, young children today collect on digital interfaces through gaming, and their play tends to unsettle digital–analog binaries. Still, no explicit attention has been paid to young children’s collecting in these broader contemporary playscapes. In this study, I plug into ethnographic accounts of young children’s collecting in Norway, sociomaterial affect theorizing of early childhood play and literacy, and the key concept of ‘answering the world.’ The children in this case are found to enact relational sensibilities to their surroundings and collect in ways that leave the unfolding of the activity up to chance. They put less stress on the acquisition of a set collection than on moving with and feeling the collecting. The world answered refers to broad playscapes composed of spaces of tangible, fleshy, organic forest floors, and shiny, blocky, vividly colored Super Mario Worlds. The relational sensibilities enacted are found to be entangled with the tension and discord of young children’s material–discursive conditions.


Introduction and background
Young children collect.Simply put, collecting refers to the non-utilitarian gathering of 'objects belonging to a particular category the collector happens to fancy' (Alsop 1982, as quoted in Pearce 1994, 157) and is a widespread feature of childhood (Lekies, Beery, and Brensinger 2017).Children are motivated to collect for the fun and joys of doing the collecting, to learn about topics of interest, to satisfy passions for what the collected items represent, to distinguish themselves from their peers, and to feel belonging to a social group (Baker and Gentry 1996).For children, the act of collecting can be deeply meaningful and provide a felt sense of agency and control over their surroundings (Danet and Katriel 1994;Loebenberg 2012;Moshenska 2008).Collecting in nature may support their emotional connection to and knowledge of nature (Beery and Lekies 2019;Beery and Jørgensen 2018;Chipeniuk 1995;Lekies and Beery 2013).It has also been found to correlate positively with their cognitive development (McAlister, Cornwell, and Krisanti Cornain 2011).Many adults have strong, sensuous memories of collecting as children (Chipeniuk 1995;Lekies and Beery 2013;Moshenska 2008).
While previous research has emphasized explicit motives and implicit functions of collecting, Baker and Gentry (1996) note an important dimension of collecting being, simply, the fun and joys of it.One of their fifth-grade informants states that the appeal of collecting is the feeling of being 'sort of happy when I'm getting hold of this stuff, just by picking something off the ground and brushing it' (Baker and Gentry 1996, 134).In her large-scale survey conducted over a century ago, Burk (1900) asked children why they collect and noted that one of the most common motivations was 'indefinite,' which prompted her to write poetically of that '"treasure" feeling' of collecting that 'twines around the heart in a more or less indefinable, unreasoning sort of way' (179).As children collect, they are touched and moved in unpredictable, indeterminate encounters with worldly treasures, whether they are pretty stones magically appearing on beaches or rare stamps in thrift stores, making their mark on collectors.
There is ambiguity in the extant research, which is itself limited, regarding this dimension of collecting, which is often, but not exclusively, present in early childhood.Typically, research on childhood collecting recruits children of school age (Baker and Gentry 1996;Danet and Katriel 1994;Loebenberg 2012) or elicits memories of childhood collecting from interviews with young people and adults (Moshenska 2008;Beery and Lekies 2019;Chipeniuk 1995;Lekies and Beery 2013).Only two articles reviewed for this study include young children of pre-school age: McAlister, Cornwell, and Krisanti Cornain (2011) study young children through an elaborate experiment, and Beery and Jørgensen (2018) include ethnographic observations of outdoor pre-school play in addition to interviews with adults.For Baker and Gentry (1996), first graders' collecting raise issues, challenging traditional understandings of collecting because items are merely randomly picked up or gifted to the children.Goal-oriented collecting often tends to serve as the gold standard of collecting.In this vein, McAlister, Cornwell, and Krisanti Cornain (2011), for example, connect collecting to executive functioning.Expressing a common sentiment about young children's collections, Lekies, Beery, and Brensinger (2017) state the following: In the early years, the process of collecting can be somewhat unrefined and undirected until children develop a more conscious interest, both in collecting and the items being collected.Motives can differ by age, with collecting in early childhood due to instinct and in middle childhood between the ages of 9 and 12 due to genuine interest, enjoyment, imitation of others who collect, competition and interest in amassing quantity.(549) For this study, I aim to explore early childhood collecting, which is typically discounted as instinctive and frivolous.In recent years, young children, very young children (Holt and Philo 2023), and even infants (Tesar et al. 2021) have attracted increased research attention among children's geographers, adding new directions for inquiry.Rigorous, sensitive theorizing of how collecting unfolds among our youngest in situ may fulfill the anthropological maxim of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.In other words, with the risk of essentializing, by developing a deeper understanding of the idiosyncratic collecting of early childhood, new, productive vantage points to study the assumed mundanity and unambiguity of collecting may emerge.
Attending to young children's seemingly nonsensical activities of rolling down hills and running around trees, Hackett and Rautio (2019) developed the concept of answering the world, which is grounded in sociomaterial affect theorizing.Answering the world and its adjacent theorizing refer to how early childhood play, rather than being deliberately designed, emerges through the subtle, sensitive correspondence between young children and their surroundings.In employing answering the world as a key concept in this study, I attend to the 'indefinable, unreasoning' (Burk 1900, 179) affective dimensions of early childhood collecting.
Children's geographers are typically attuned to the embodied and material everyday practices of children, for example rolling down hills, but they have historically largely evaded engaging with young children's consumption of popular cultureespecially young children's consumption.The everyday chaos and randomness of children's mediatized play, however, is well served by the modes of inquiry commonplace in the research field of children's geographies.For example, in one study, Horton (2010) found that dimensions of meaning or identity did not exhaust the position of S Club 7 among children.S Club 7 was also about vibes and stuff that contingently came together but also, recounted in a telling epilogue, came apart: 'I liked them when I was little, but not anymore' (393).In another study, Horton (2012) shows how Pokémon is co-implicated in children's singular and messy geographies, rather than just a global coherent phenomenonthe children in the study carry worn, dirty cards in old grocery bags everywhere they go.
Young children's playscapes (Abrams, Rowsell, and Merchant 2017) are rapidly changing and wholly new ways of moving, spacing, and mattering with new media technologies are emerging.For example, gaming provides new ways of collecting for young childrenin Pokémon, they collect fantasy monsters, and in Animal Crossing, they collect fish, stones, and sticks.Video games often facilitate the collection of items that do not have a function either in the game or outside of it (Cao 2022), and in Bartle's (1996) influential typology of approaches to gaming, 'achieving' (i.e.performing tasks to collect badges, items, and trophies) is one of only four approaches.Gamers collect not only to reach extraneous ends, but because they value collecting as an end in itself (Toups et al. 2016).However, while young children's gaming has been studied for some time (e.g.Björk-Willén and Aronsson 2014; Danby et al. 2018;Lundtofte, Bjerre Odgaard, and Skovbjerg 2019), there is no explicit research on how they collect while gaming.Furthermore, recent empirical studies and theoretical developments within early childhood research suggest that new media technologies in young children's contemporary play are 'ubiquitously present and mundanely invisible' (Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth 2022, 2).New media technologies feed off and into young children's play in broad playscapes (Abrams, Rowsell, and Merchant 2017).This has prompted calls to perform 'holistic examinations of the reality of [children's] play': rather than study play with digital devices as isolated events, researchers should explore how new media technologies participate in young children's lives 'in combination with broader knowledge of children's life experiences and interests' (Parry and Scott 2020, 450).
To summarize, little attention has been paid to the affective dimensions of young children's collecting in broader contemporary playscapes.In the present study, ethnographic accounts of young children's everyday collecting at home and in pre-school, and sociomaterial affect theorizing of early childhood literacy and play support my inquiry into the following research question: how do young children answer the world through contemporary playful collecting?Sociomaterial affect theorizing of literacy and play in early childhood Young children's collecting is a form of play, in the sense that it is a spatially and temporally distinct activity outside of the mundane and ordinary through which the player's surroundings acquire new meanings (Caillois 1961;Huizinga 1950).Collecting stamps, for example, is an activity in which stamps are bought, sold, and traded as meaningful and categorized as 'items' of a 'collection,' rather than serving solely as small paper rectangles used for postage.Children's play, however, is no simple pastime or non-committal whim.Rather, it is a complex, culturally relevant form of literacy that is not reducible to a precursor or a lesser form of reading or writing: play is an embodied literacy, as young children engage in multimodal meaning making through their bodies (Wohlwend 2018).In this sense, collecting is a form ofplayfulliteracy, as young children engage in representational activities by imbuing their collecting and collections with consequential narratives and meaning.
However, there is more to literacies than 'socially recognized forms of representation' (Burnett and Merchant 2021, 355).Newer approachesproposed and developed through, for example, multiple contributions in Children's Geographieshave challenged anthropocentric and representational thinking of literacy.Everyday items and collectibles are not mute entities waiting to be represented through human meaning-making practices and language.Instead, they are construed as active and becoming, exerting pushes and pulls of affect in complex relationships with humans in social life (Hackett 2021).While Barad (2007) does not explicitly employ the concept of affect, she provides an accurate description of the dynamics through which affect is produced in the following excerpt: Meaning is […] an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility.In its causal intra-activity, part of the world becomes determinately bounded and propertied in its emergent intelligibility, while lively matterings, possibilities, and impossibilities are reconfigured.(149) In this view, affect is a force produced through encounters or 'dances.'It moves, coalesces, and spreadssometimes into meanings and stable, bounded properties, and other times into surpluses of affect, which point toward new potentialities and emergences.Relating affectively to research thus implies a consideration and feel for the seemingly whole, bounded, and knowable bodies that emerge, as well as what slips away and bursts into unknown futures as intangible atmospheres and surges of indeterminate affective intensities (e.g.Gregg and Siegworth 2010;Ehret and Leander 2019;McLure 2013).Consider, for example, the stamp collector: while stamps often have specific meanings that are shared with other collectors, certain stamps may for individual collectors glow with singular qualities that are hard to explain, and certain stamp collecting events may give collectors inexplicable tingles from being there at that very moment.These elusive and intense sensations and experiences are also likely important dimensions of what it feels like to be a stamp collector.Hackett and Rautio (2019) argue that young children, through their playmore specifically, their sensorimotor play of running around trees and rolling down hillstend to 'answer the world,' which refers to a specific way of relating to place as they engage in equal encounters with their physical surroundings.While children rolling and running may have intentions with their actions, the outcome is not determined in advance, and the children enjoy and facilitate this unpredictability.Such activity epitomizes a literacy in its own right, in which a relational sensitivity and a porousness to the world is enacted and felt.Such literacies are 'more-than-human,' as their locus is not exclusively human, but extends beyond the skin.Young children appear prone to enact this permeable relationship with the world through their play (Wohlwend and Thiel 2019).Rautio (2013), for example, claims the following: Children, by virtue of their both biophysical and socially/culturally constructed existence, often seem to apply what Bennett (2010) describes as aesthetic-affective openness towards material surroundings: an attentiveness to and sensuous enchantment by non-human forces, an openness to be surprised and to grant agency to nonhuman entities.(395) Rautio notes that attending to this phenomenon is not about othering young children as more 'open' but rather about recognizing what they 'find inherently rewarding and spend considerable time engaging in' (395).Young children's play typically embodies 'worldful' (Bogost 2016) qualities in the sense that their surroundings are experienced as enthusiastic playmates rather than empty vessels to be creatively manipulatedto which sociomaterial theorizing of affective dimensions of early childhood literacy and play attunes researchers.
For this study, I quickly felt and became cognizant of chance as a central feature of the young children's play.Games of chance typically involve a relinquishing of control to something other than the playerwhether it be fate, destiny, or fortuneand can thus be said to be a strictly bounded and constraining category of play (Caillois 1961).Such accounts of games of chanceas limiting the playerare based on understandings that put the player at the center of activity.There are, however, dimensions of play that involve 'the chaotic and arbitrary play of physical forces, [transforming] men [sic] into both players and playthings' (Spariosu 1989, 16), which may be particularly evident in games of chance.Rather than the unfolding of pure, unrestrained creativity, play in this sense, resonating with sociomaterial affect theorizing, is what happens as you accept and worldfully work within the limitations of your surroundings and surrender to God, the World, or the Cosmos (Bogost 2016;Hackett and Rautio 2019).Rather than limiting play, games of chance offer new avenues through which it can unfold; precisely because these boundaries make themselves known and felt, trajectories veer off in unanticipated ways, and it is in these novel movements that games of chance can emergenot only as a specific category of play but as a potential dimension of all play.
Consider, for example, hopscotch: the stone with its uneven edges is thrown and moves in relation to the rigid system of the grid and play rules, creating unruly trajectories that, pleasurably, cannot be predicted.

Modes of inquiry
From May 2020 to November 2021, I carried out ethnographic fieldwork at a pre-school and in three young children's homes.I made 64 visits in all and collected field notes, approximately 250 photographs, and 36 h of synchronized dual-video recordings.Located in a socio-economically diverse suburban area of a large Norwegian city, the pre-school housed around 60 one-to sixyear-olds (all participants of this study were three to five years old) and 15 educators in five classes.At the time of the fieldwork reported in this studypeak pandemic in the spring and summer of 2020the children at the pre-school spent most of their time playing freely outdoors, and the playground was divided into smaller patches where each class could play while socially distanced from the others.One of the classes spent most of their time at an offsite pre-school forest patch to make space for the other classes.This patch was a dense, unfenced forest that, while only a few hundred feet from the pre-school, felt unconstrained and remote.While the extent of time spent and the way in which this was done outdoors was accentuated by the ongoing pandemic, socio-historically, Nordic early childhood education has privileged nature and the outdoors as important places for autonomous play and exploration (Sandseter and Lysklett 2017).
The family home chosen for the present study was within walking distance from the pre-school.The house was semi-detached and located among other semi-detached houses in domestic but natural outdoor surroundings.Narrow asphalt roads covered the ground, offering space for riding a bicycle or pushing a baby stroller.Smaller patches of rocky hills, grass, and trees characterized the area, as well as modest playgrounds.In the house, a five-year-old boy, Yahtzee Champignon (Yahtzee), shared a bedroom with his sibling and a roof with his two parents. 1 Yahtzee loved video games -Minecraft and Super Mario in particularwhich he mostly played on a family iPad.He wanted to be a gaming YouTuber when he got older but assured me that he was not completely 'video game crazy,' a label he was prone to be assigned by other children and adults.His other interests included making comic books, Harry Potter, and playing outside with his friends.Racer, Yahtzee's younger friend who attended a playdate at Yahtzee's house reported in this study, was a four-year-old boy who lived with his parents and two siblings.He enjoyed playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Minecraft, and Super Mario on Nintendo DS and iPad, watching video game walkthroughs on YouTube, and creating and drawing.He was an imaginative, whimsical, and popular boy with a tender relationship with his older sibling, who was also an avid gamer.Overall, the boys had high levels of access to new media technologies and passionate interests in gaming.65% of Norwegian four-to fiveyear-olds have access to computer tablets, 63% watch YouTube or YouTube Kids, and 65% play video games weekly or daily (The Norwegian Media Authority 2023).
In contemporary early childhood play, new media technologies are 'mundanely invisible and ubiquitously present' (Pettersen, Arnseth, and Silseth 2022, 2), weaving the narratives, characters, items, and ludic features of digital culture into young children's play.Previous research has demonstrated, for example, how QR codes and technology augment children's playgrounds (Nansen and Apperley 2020), how gaming and outdoor play bleed into each other (Burn 2013;Pettersen, Silseth, and Arnseth 2022), how construction play and watching YouTube resonate across moments (Pettersen and Ehret forthcoming), and how makeshift pretend 'iPads' are played into being in preschool play (Flint and Adams 2023).It follows that researchers should explore how new media technologies 'feed into play, in combination with broader knowledge of children's life experiences and interests' in a 'holistic examination of the reality of [children's] play' (Parry and Scott 2020, 450).Accordingly, while my initial research interests were children's relationships with new media technologies, my ethnographic scope was wide and imbued with a relational sensitivity attuned to the broader contemporary playscapes of early childhood.Playscapes here refer to the expansive

Ethics
Parents consented to their children taking part in the research project by first reading information sheets and then signing consent forms.As an ongoing process, age-appropriate information was given to the children at multiple times.They were asked to assent or dissent as it became salient, and I worked to remain sensitive to their non-verbal cues of discomfort or unease (Flewitt 2005).The other plentiful ethical considerations of the research project are elaborated on in the dissertation (Pettersen 2023) of which this study is part.

Analysis
Collecting cones, leaves, slugs, and insects During the first weeks of my fieldwork at the pre-school, I spent most of my time with the children outdoors on an offsite pre-school forest patch and on the pre-school playground.The educators remarked that there was more open-ended, unsupervised play and good vibes among the children, which they attributed to their spending more time outdoors.In accordance with previous research (Beery and Lekies 2019;Lekies and Beery 2013;Lekies, Beery, and Brensinger 2017;Chipeniuk 1995;Beery and Jørgensen 2018), popular activities among the children included gathering debris from the forest floor, such as rocks, sticks, and cones.However, this gathering was typically characterized by a lack of tenacity and collection coherency.After a classic 'treasure hunt,' for example, a group of children did not keep the cones they collected, nor did they refer to them during later activities.Slowly, the pile of cones merged with its forest surroundings, which included needles, worms, and moss.On another day, a girl amassed tens of cones and proceeded to hand them out indiscriminately to other children with a trash grabber she had come across.Similarly, on a third day, a group of children was observed to be on the prowl: Superman, Butterfly, Racer, and other children were looking for slugs and insects, which they put on a flat rock that Superman was carrying around.Superman kept losing slugs, but the children did not seem to mind too much.The hunt seemed more important than having more insects.But the children and I also made barriers, made of sticks and bark, and we wondered where the slugs and insects went when we could not find them.(Field notes, May 25, 2020 2 ) They left Superman, a younger boy not physically equipped for the task, in charge of managing a large flat rock populated by live slugs and insects.The other children did not 'seem to mind too much' that the collection changedinsects and slugs would fly, move, or slide off the rock as it was handled haphazardlysuggesting that the items collected on the rock were not the nexus of the event.Rather, running to-and-fro, picking up slugs and insects, making barriers, and looking for lost items were what appeared to matter most to the participants.
I would also frequently find two boys, Yahtzee and Racer, on the pre-school playground, each carrying a pot or a bucket, brimful of cones, and consistently losing one or two cones from the top.The cones would be nicknamed 'potatoes' or 'Goombas' (the infamous grumpy, brown antagonists of Nintendo's Mario lore), because of the shared visual characteristics of being amorphous and brown.Later in the day, I would often find cones, still in buckets or pots, placed randomly around the playground, lost and forgotten.Pre-school staff would pour the cones out at the end of the day while cleaning up the playground, only for the boys to collect them once again the coming day.
During this time, Yahtzee and Racer were getting to know each other and often visited each other's houses.During the lockdown, children were recommended to limit their social interactions to a select bubble of people, and the two classmates quickly came together through their mutual interest in video games.One day, I followed the two as Racer excitedly visited Yahtzee's house.The familiar cone collecting routine once again emerged, but this time in an extended edition: Yahtzee and Racer are running outside right after coming home from pre-school.[…] They are on top of a rocky hill encircled by semi-detached houses.They are picking up cones from the ground and placing them in a small cavity on the rocky hill.They call the cavity a 'volcano.'The cones are called 'potatoes.'They tell me that the king of the potatoes is a Goomba, one of the antagonists of Super Mario.The potatoes are, in fact, all Goombas.They are also gathering leaves of rowan, which they call 'fantorangs,' a deliberate mispronunciation of the Super Mario weapons boomerangs.The mispronunciation is an inside joke based on how Racer once misspoke, with Fantorangen being a popular character on Norwegian public television for children.Leaves of maple and some red leaves are, respectively, 'eating flowers' (piranha plants in the Mario lore) and 'fire chains' (titled the same in Mario lore), all obstacles in Super Mario.It all goes into the volcano.(Field notes, September 10, 2020) Once again, the boys collected potatoes/Goombas, but this time with fantorangs, eating flowers, and fire chains, resonating with the video games they loved.Later, the boys moved from this activity to a nearby playground, where they met up with Yahtzee's father, and, as per usual, the leaves and cones were left behind on the rocky hill, most likely to be forgotten about.As fall turned to winter, the cones and leaves would have been submerged in snow, only to reappear decomposed come spring.
This field note drew my attention to the boys' gaming.As the boys drew connections while collecting cones and leaves outdoors that resonated with their experiences of playing video games, I revisited my field notes and video recordings to see how collecting was enacted while the children were playing the video games.In the next section, I provide an account from one day of my fieldwork during which Yahtzee and Racer played a video game and collected in ways that resonated with the collecting enacted on the rocky neighborhood hill, the offsite pre-school forest patch, and the pre-school playground.

Collecting rainbows, toads, and stars
Yahtzee and Racer excitedly sat on the top bunk of Yahtzee's bunk bed to play Super Mario Run 3 on an iPad after dinner on the balcony.Yahtzee walked upstairs to ask his mother to download the most recent update, returned, handed Racer the iPad, and told him to play Remix 10, a subgame of Super Mario Run.In Remix 10, there are 30 areas, each with ten ultra-short levels, scored by a fast-paced, peppy soundtrack.The player is supposed to collect three rainbow-colored 'bonus medals' at each level and the progress is represented visually on screen as they play.Furthermore, all medals of an area are counted ceremoniously on screen after ten levels.If they got all three bonus medals from one level, it constituted a 'rainbow,' according to the boys.In such cases, they would scream and jump, 'I got all,' or 'I got a rainbow!' Yahtzee, in one instance, reminisced joyously, 'once, I got a rainbow on all [the ten levels]!' In a bonus game following the completion of an area of ten levels, the player gets new items, such as mushrooms or warp pipes.'I wonder what we'll get now,' Yahtzee asked multiple times, suggesting the importance of the collecting, as well as the uncertainty about the awarding of items.The items are collected in a cache and can be used to decorate and customize the player's 'kingdom' in a mode called Kingdom Builder.
Later, the two switched to Toad Rally, another sub-game of Super Mario Run, in which the player competes against their friends or other players online on medium to short courses.When the player performs more 'stylish moves'somersaults, fancy jumps, and so onmore toads appear at the bottom of the screen to support them.After each rally, the player's score is calculated depending on several factors, such as how many coins are amassed during the rally, and how many toads end up supporting the player.This 'toad tally' provides the basis for who wins, and the winner gets the other player's toads for their kingdom.Amassing more toads allows the player to buy more items to decorate and customize their kingdom.While most of these items are aesthetic, with no explicit function in game play, the awarding of items elicited enthusiastic outbursts.For example, in one exchange, reproduced in Table 1, Yahtzee had played the bonus game of Remix 10, which awarded him a decorative star.
While they played Remix 10, Yahtzee asked Racer multiple times to 'check on [his] gifts,' (i.e.items in the cache collected from the bonus game or through purchases in Kingdom Builder).He slowly moves his fingers on the screen to look at all the items.One reviewer noted negatively about Super Mario Run that it sometimes 'feels like a lengthy grind in service of unlocking mostly cosmetic items' (McWerthor 2016, para.12).Still, Yahtzee and Racer enjoyed this aspect of the game.In another exchange, reproduced in Table 2, Yahtzee explained.Amassing toads, then, is not something Yahtzee did for instrumental gainnot even decorative items for their kingdombut for the pleasure of 'get[ting] a lot.' Watching the video recordings, I thought back to Racer and Yahtzee collecting cones.This also seemed like a 'lengthy grind' with no discernible endgame other than collecting, which was, in similar ways, accompanied by joyous and pleasurable outbursts.Despite cones lacking brightly colored visuals or the accompaniment of a fast-paced soundtrack, the abundance of the tactilely pleasant cones provided an endless supply of desirable items to be collected, which kept the pace and the boys going.
In Remix 10 and Toad Rally, the complexity was sometimes overwhelming, and too intricate to describe in its entirety here.'Secret courses,' 'coin rushes,' and 'super stars' often emerged seemingly at random.During Toad Rally's toad tally, both boys were typically quiet, excitedly awaiting their scores, loudly cheering if they won, or visibly deflated if they lost.As they both had yet to master three-digit numbers, they waited until a toad referee pointed their flag toward the winner on screen, and the toads moved to the winner's corner.It did not appear to be clear which strategy was 'best' in Toad Rally: running fast, amassing coins, doing stylish moves, or something else? Often, Yahtzee resorted to pressing the screen fast, rhythmically, and randomly all overincreasingly intense if nothing happened.By doing so, he gave up on relying on skill or knowledge alone, instead trying his luck to see if he could get Mario to miraculously perform outrageous stunts, which might get him points, and, in effect, desirable items.Instead of honing in or expanding their skills and knowledge, the two, in similar ways, often ended up doing something random and hoping for the best when the score was calculated.For example, as they played Remix 10, Yahtzee would sing a nonsensical song to score their gameplay, which took up most of the boys' attention for a while.Mario, through the novel automatic runner feature, would keep running regardless.When Racer no longer entertained the idea of winning in Toad Rally, he enjoyed dying spectacular deaths by falling into the abyss while bursting into a series of stylish moves, reappearing only seconds later.More-than-human collecting In their collecting, the children constructed temporally and spatially distinct boundaries within which new play rules applied.For example, during the treasure hunt, some children reframed cones as representing treasures to be found rather than natural objects that carried the seeds of trees. 4Adding to this, previous research suggests that the cones, and the collection of cones, not only represented treasures but also something deeper embedded in the children's social worlds, such as feelings of control and agency (Danet and Katriel 1994;Loebenberg 2012;Moshenska 2008).Interpreting and producing signs and making sense of relevant modes of collecting (e.g.knowing the collection discourse, being able to exercise autonomy through collecting, and so on) constitute forms of literacy, and, arguably, such literacies are most likely enacted in the illustrations I have provided.However, by plugging into sociomaterial affect theorizing, another dimension of collecting, privileging the disorganized and unruly, emerges.I argue that collecting is not all about making sense but also about making nonsense (see Wohlwend et al. 2017).In the following, I explain how the children answer the world (Hackett and Rautio 2019) in unpredictable encounters through the becoming forms of, first, collecting as games of chance and, second, the leaky collection.
First, I illustrate collecting as a game of chance.In playing Remix 10 and Toad Rally, Yahtzee and Racer did not understand how scores were calculated and often yielded their own intentional and individual contributions to allow for the dynamics of the encounter to determine the outcome (cf.Bogost 2016).For example, when Yahtzee touched the screen wildly and at random, he did not know what would come of it, but likely hoped he would be awarded an item of his liking for the effort.The tension of the silence as scores were calculated, and the outbursts of joy or deflated sighs as the scores were displayed, suggest that the children may not necessarily treat the toads awarded as badges of achievement, but instead as prizes in games of chance.This type of playful collecting unsettles how we normally think of literacy because games of chance precisely exclude individual skills, ever so contextualized, as a factor in the activity (Caillois 1961).In this type of game, the 'skill' needed is to forfeit (e.g. plunge into the digital abyss or sing a song rather than play along) by recognizing and giving way for other forces to move the play into unknown territory.In Super Mario Run, the game moves on its own accord through the automatic runner feature.When the children engaged in a treasure hunt in the forest, the treasures were valued because there was an element of unpredictability in the questthey were 'gifts' of external, possibly benevolent, forces.While some skills were awarded (e.g.knowing to look for cones under trees may be a useful skill), the cones could be anywhere, and their pursuit was not all a matter of individual ingenuity, creativity, and skill; it also depended on the direction of the wind or the age of the trees.The children left their chances of being awarded collectible items to more-than-human serendipity.
Second, I illustrate the leaky collection.According to my field notes, the children did not 'seem to mind too much' about slugs and insects escaping the flat rock, nor did Yahtzee and Racer mind too much about leaving their cones and leaves behind in the volcano.Their collections were not contained, and it did not appear as if the children intended them to be so.They were content with permeable, shifting, and leaky collectionsbringing to mind young children's fleeting engagements with Pokémon and S Club 7 documented by Horton (2010;2012).As the rock and the slug made their marks known and felt, answering the world unfolded into new becoming forms.However, the inclination of the young children to 'let' themselves be touched by the world through 'worldful' (Bogost 2016), 'aesthetic-affective openness' (Bennett 2010, as quoted in Rautio 2013) may have, in this case, cloaked the children in more agency than was warranted.The entanglement of self and world may have been a condition in which they irrespectively found themselves, and which was accentuated because of the relational discrepancy between, for example, the expectations articulated through the availability of the rock (or the game features of Super Mario Run) and their respective abilities.No matter how much Superman wanted to block the slugs from moving, he was unable to.The slugs slipped and slid, the insects took flight, the rock was too heavy, and his arms were too short.Likewise, Yahtzee's random and wild pressing of the screen could also be traced back to how young children's fine motor skills tend to be less coordinated.Yahtzee and Racer's excitement and surprise at learning who won could be traced to how certain cognitive tasks, such as understanding three-digit numbers, tend to be more demanding for young children.It follows that young children's encounters with the world may often be imbued with a different kind of tension and discord than those of able-bodied adults.This suggests how 'sensibilities' and ways of relating are entangled with current material-discursive conditions.
This argument echoes deficiency discourses of early childhood.Sociomaterial theorizing has been instrumental in critiquing such discourses (Murris, Smalley, and Allan 2020).However, while I am wary of using language that reduces children to 'developing' or 'not yet able,' it is not a banal point, and, importantly, consistent with sociomaterial affect theorizing, that Superman struggled to keep the flat rock level, and that this, in turn, affected the movement of the moment.Because of the volatility between Superman and the rockany minute it might have slipped out of his hands and hit his foota relational, moving sensitivity was necessitated, rather than the amassing of 'propertied' (Barad 2007, 149) collections.In Super Mario Run, chaotic visuals and a fast-paced soundtrack rendered the system behind the calculation of the scores nebulous for the children, and seemingly intentionally so, as colorful numbers, mysterious symbols, and pretty sounds rushed by on screen too fast for anyone to digest.Pleasurable affects of anticipation and suspense were produced from one moment to the next, as the toads would multiply or be decimated, or a coin rush would emerge and award the player a ton of coins.The collection slid, slithered, and spilled over, privileging not the amassment of a set collection, but a more-than-human answering the world through collecting.
More-than-digital collecting I now return to my original point of departure for this study: my field notes from the rocky neighborhood hill on which Yahtzee and Racer collected leaves and cones.In their play on the rocky neighborhood hill, the boys brought to the fore how affects produced and felt through collecting in the pre-school playground and the offsite pre-school forest patch resonated with the affects produced and felt when collecting in Remix 10 and Toad Rally.In the lush Norwegian forest patches, slugs would appear, moving the children to pick them up and place them on a flat stone, only for them to slither away seconds after, thereby prompting a rescue mission.Playing Remix 10, the surprising emergence of a star affected Yahtzee, who answered by smiling and attempting to check on his other gifts.The random encounters with collectibles and the unsettled collections spilling over produced felt, indeterminate qualities that the young children facilitated, enjoyed, and sensitively attended towhat Hackett and Rautio (2019) call answering the world.As a specific contribution of this study, the 'world' answered refers to the broad playscapes composed of tangible, fleshy, organic forest floors, and shiny, blocky, vividly colored Super Mario Worlds.
Other ways of telling this story are, however, possible.For example, a reader could argue that, as Yahtzee and Racer did not have 24/7 access to their iPads, they settled for a less-than-ideal outdoor substitute: with scant resources and screen time rules, they enacted inaccurate playful representations in lieu of the real thing.However, the boys never gave the impression that their activity was vicarious.The movement was not derived from a perceived lack, but from excess.The vitality and vigor increased as new elements were added to the assemblage, and their eagerness was palpable.My visits to their home were often very welcomed by the boys, because they knew this meant relatively unrestricted access to their digital devices.Still, they chose to walk around the rocky neighborhood hill and pick up cones and leaves.This was not a convenient makeshift video game, because it resonated differently with the boys.Rather than 'made do,' the children 'made much' (Wohlwend and Thiel 2019) by attuning to the affects produced through and across more-than-digital moments of collecting.Plugging into non-representational theorizing, they were not appropriating and enacting already established practices in a new context but were instead dwelling in the production of novel affective intensities through the encounters and connections of digital networks, sensuous memories, playground discourse, and tangible things in front of them.It follows that the assumed 'digital' of playing video games and the assumed 'analog' of collecting cones are far from poor representations of each other: they are instead rich, generative, morethan-digital moments that feed off, connect to, and resonate with one another.Through the young children's collecting on the rocky neighborhood hill, broader playscapes of contemporary early childhood play were produced that were both more-than-human and more-than-digital.

Final words
In summary, this study contributes to extant research on young children's collecting by attending to its affective dimensions and the broader contemporary playscapes of early childhood.While the study discusses early childhood collecting, the findings may resonate with the reader in relation to adult collecting, which likely and just as easily can include more-than-human and more-thandigital dimensions.Adult collecting, on the other hand, may include other dimensions, such as monetary or scientific pursuitswhich may also be present among young children.The purpose of the study was not to uncover essential traits of early childhood collecting.Instead, by sensitively and rigorously exploring the situated and contingent unfolding of a seemingly mundane and unambiguous phenomenon like collecting among a group of young, spirited Norwegian children, it emerged anew as something peculiar, idiosyncratic, and multiple.
First, I consider how chance encounters play vital roles in the unfolding of activities, and how the children's collections are leaky.Both of these are qualities the children facilitate and in which they take pleasure.Taking such dimensions seriously affects how we respond to young children's playful collecting.Do we recognize accidental and random collecting coming together and breaking apart contingently as a worthwhile enterprise, or do we redirect the children toward 'proper' collecting?Do we recognize and facilitate the felt vitality of Superman carrying a flat rock with insects and slugs (cf.Boldt 2021), and give the children time to dwell in these encounters?Still, such narratives may echo romanticist discourses of young children's play as authentic and freewheeling.Accordingly, this study also suggests that young children's relational sensibilities should not be studied in isolation from the tension and discord of their material-discursive conditions, as their surroundings may put them under more stress, thereby necessitating encounters imbued with more work and sensitivity.
Second, this study finds that the 'the world' answered (Hackett and Rautio 2019) in this case refers to 'broad playscapes composed of both tangible, fleshy, organic forest floors and shiny, blocky, vividly colored Super Mario Worlds.'Such connections and resonances, which Yahtzee and Racer brought to the fore on the rocky neighborhood hill, are followed through this study, as I felt for the affects produced rather than for recognizable tool mediated practices ('exploring nature' and 'playing video games').Typically, in public discourse, children's relationships with nature and outdoor play are contrasted with their use of new media technologies, which provides support for the 'displacement hypothesis' of screen time replacing time spent outdoors or playing with friends (Louv 2005).This study argues that some young children navigate and produce vibrant new spaces for play that transcend such binary oppositions and suggests, in contrast, that it may be fruitful to feel for what children 'find inherently rewarding and spend considerable time engaging in' (Rautio 2013, 395).Doing so requires that we move with the flows and interruptions of affect, irrespective of being on screen or off screen, sense or nonsense.
1.All names are self-chosen pseudonyms.2. All field notes throughout have been edited for readability.3.This is a popular automatic runner platform video game in Nintendo's Mario franchise.The information cited about the game was retrieved by playing the game, watching walkthroughs on YouTube, and via fan wikis, such as https://www.mariowiki.com/Super_Mario_Run and https://mario.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Mario_Run.
4. Treasure hunts may be framed as important ways of collecting for young children.Recall Burk (1900) who wrote about the '"treasure" feeling' of collecting.

Table 2 .
Yahtzee reveals what happens when he gets one thousand toads in Toad Rally.
Yahtzee I've got more than a hundred [toads]!I can't wait to get one thousand.Kenneth ((Laughing)) Yeah, that'll be great.Racer What can you do then?Yahtzee Uhm … Then you can … I'll just continue.And then I can get ten thousand … Then I can get a lot.

Table 1 .
Yahtzee gets a star in Remix 10.