Today, powerful companies produce toys and games that introduce children across the globe to activities, roles (including gender roles) and values that are central to the contemporary neoliberal order. In the process they redefine what childhood is and how children are to learn about the world they live in.

Drawing on extensive research by the authors and their associates over more than two decades, this book focuses on toys and games as resources for play, analysing their functionalities as well as their symbolic meaning potentials, and exemplifying how they are used in different contexts, such as home and preschool, and how these uses are regulated by parental, pedagogic and marketing discourses.

Building on the work of semioticians such as Barthes, Baudrillard and Krampen, as well as on the social semiotics of Halliday, Kress, Hodge and others, the book starts by introducing a framework for the multimodal semiotic analysis of physical objects, and the ways in which they are digitally translated into words, images and sounds. It also introduces a multimodal framework with a focus on designs for and in learning. It then applies these frameworks to a range of toys and games for young children including teddy bears, dolls, construction toys, war toys and digital games. It concludes by showing how the toy and games industry contributes to changing the nature of childhood and the way children learn about the world.