THE AMBIGUITY OF PLAY

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, in ducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enact ed in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has bee n proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to metaphysics, mathematics, and sociolog y.Sutton...[Read more]