This paper considers how children develop digital literacy through offline practices of play. By inventing games, children rehearse and build up the competences, knowledge, and skills necessary to engage with online technologies in later life. While prior studies on digital literacy and play have explored children's digital interactions with media, children's play around media is increasingly traversing online-offline boundaries. Consequently, we argue that to fully comprehend how children build up understandings of the digital, paradoxically, we should also consider how they engage with digital media in offline settings. Drawing upon participants observations of 8-12-year-old children attending afterschool childcare (N = 77) and in-depth interviews with children, their parents, and pedagogical staff in The Netherlands, we develop a typology of practices of converged play through which children replicate, remix, and re-enact digital media in everyday life. Our findings emphasize that children's digital literacy is foremost a social practice developed primarily in relation with others, within and beyond the digital realm. Thus, we argue that taking a sociocultural and non-media centric approach to play is vital for understanding children's development of digital literacy, in a way that does justice to children's continuous exposure to and immersion in digital media in everyday life. Prior state of knowledge: Play is instrumental for how children develop the ability to deal with digital media. Existing research finds that by inventing games, children practice and build up the digital literacy necessary to navigate an increasingly digital society in their later life.Novel contributions: Prior research has primarily focused on how children's online interactions with media foster their digital competencies, knowledge, and skills. We find that children's engagement with the digital in offline settings is equally essential for understanding how children build digital literacy.Practical implications: This study has practical implications for pedagogical staff, parents, and teachers aiming to facilitate children's digital literacy, indicating that facilitating offline play around digital media can help children learn informational skills, knowledge about media production and social norms around technology.
