Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can
merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills,
inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in
games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming,
enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a
leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it
has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from
biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and
sociology.
Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct
"rhetorics"--the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal
Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the
Imaginary, and the Self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the
question of play in child development to the implications of play
for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical
sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of
play put forth in each discourse's "objective" theory.
This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than
affinities, with one striking exception: however different their
descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a
quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this,
Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the
variability that allows for "natural" selection. As a form of
mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after
successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability.
Further, he shows how these discourses, despite their differences,
might offer the components for a new social science of play.
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