Theories of Play

Theorizing play in Western social thought has been guided by questions such as what are the essential characteristics of play? What counts as play? Why do humans play? And what is play for? The answers to these questions have varied significantly given that there are countless kinds of play, an equally diverse range of players, and an increasing number of epistemological and methodological approaches to the study of play. For instance, play has been studied in relation to the body, behaviour, cognition, emotion, identity, gender, communication, experience, culture, power, and more, and in each case the word play is used to describe a range of different activities and outcomes. Despite significant differences, one thing theories of play do commonly share is a strong commitment to the idea that play is a serious and meaningful activity for human beings.

The view that play means serious business is especially shared by theories of children’s play, which has typically been theorized in western societies as separate and distinct from adult play. For example, some of the most influential play theorists, including Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Clifford Geertz, and Mikhail Bakhtin, were not primarily concerned with children’s play. The work of these theorists is focused on the socio-cultural role play occupies within adult settings such as the Balinese cock-fighting ring, carnival, religion, and even war. The study of children’s play, on the other hand, has attracted more scholarship, but has been focused primarily on play’s role in the cognitive, behavioural, and emotional development of the child. This entry introduces how play and childhood have been conceptualized in the West, briefly summarizes many of the major classical children’s play theories, and discusses some contemporary challenges of theorizing children’s play in constantly changing and increasingly digital environments.

Play and Childhood

In the twenty-first century it can be hard to imagine a time when play wasn’t the child’s right. In the West, play it is routinely endorsed by paediatricians, incorporated into school curriculum, written into government policies, and celebrated by children’s media cultures. However, much of what we think we know about play is easily taken for granted, for example the idea that play is a topic worthy of serious and rigorous theorization. Prior to the eighteenth century, adult attitudes toward play are said to have ranged from disapproving to ambivalent. Whether society viewed play as a total waste of time or simply didn’t give it much consideration, historians maintain that no special significance was placed on children’s play prior to this period. Among the first to argue for play’s importance was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who acknowledged play as a natural feature of childhood. In Emile, the ideal education for the child, he argues, is to roam freely, to explore, and to play in nature. Like many of the eighteenth century Romantics, Rousseau idealized childhood as a period of freedom and innocence and considered play one of its purest expressions.

Rousseau referred to play as the child’s right more than three centuries before it was officially declared by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Apparently ahead of his time, however, Rousseau’s views were not widely accepted by Victorian society. The ideas of John Locke, the late seventeenth and eighteenth century philosopher, were more likely to have resonated among a society that believed, as the Victorians did, that free time should be used to improve oneself. Rather than stimulate creativity and imagination in the child, Locke argued that play should be encouraged for practical purposes only. For example, he recommended the use of lettered blocks for teaching children the alphabet. So although play remained important for the child, it was mostly heuristic play that found supporters, while many other types of play, like pretend play, were disregarded or discouraged. According to this view, play was only important insofar as it could produce something other than play.

The new emphasis on making play productive was also part of a change in views generally about the needs of childhood. Changing divisions of labour replaced children’s work with free time, making it common for play to be referred to as the child’s new work. The segregation of children from adult life placed new demands on child-rearing and created a need for mass instruction and discipline through formal education. This concern for providing specialized care and training to children continued, and by the nineteenth century controlling the child’s development became the formal interest of child psychology. Under the influence of the biological and environmental assumptions of Darwinism, childhood began to be understood as a distinct period of life with clear stages of development, and theorists largely agreed that play was one of the primary mechanisms through which the child’s development occurred and could be controlled—If you could control the muscles, it was said, then you could control the mind.

Children’s Play Theory

Conceptually, play became quite amenable to the idea of childhood as a biological period of maturation toward adulthood, which is clearly reflected in early theories of children’s play. Not surprisingly, these early theories developed mainly within the growing field of child psychology. The theories noted below are regarded by textbooks and handbooks as the classical theories on children’s play and have had a major influence in shaping the history of thinking about childhood and play.

Play and Educational Theory

Educational theorists Friedrich Frobel (1782-1852) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952) each advocated play as a means for learning. Frobel is remembered as the founder of the first kindergarten in Blankenburg, Germany in 1826, which became a model upon which future kindergartens were established. For Frobel play was not a trivial pastime but a serious occupation that should be nurtured through adult guidance and the use of appropriate objects. The first Montessori School similarly promoted adult guided play that would foster the development of practical skills. Montessori was especially concerned with the child’s moral development and believed that only certain types of play were appropriate. For example, she distrusted imaginative and fantasy play but appreciated toys and puzzles that could train the child in useful skills.

Surplus Energy Theory

Among the first scientific studies of childhood was that of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) whose theory was that play was a way for children to expel surplus energy and to master skills. Spencer believed that play was a phase of childhood and mainly about immediate gratification.

Practice Theory

A follower of Charles Darwin, who had pioneered connections between animal and human play behaviour, Karl Groos (1861-1946) published two influential books in 1896 and 1901 entirely related to play: The Play of Animals and The Play of Man. Like Darwin, Groos helped to popularize the practice of using animal behaviour as a basis for understanding human play. Groos strongly disagreed with Herbert Spencer’s surplus energy theory, arguing that play wasn’t just a way to relax and burn energy, but instead served a definite function in developing the skills needed for survival. Simply put, play was a form of practice and preparation for real life, making play the essential purpose of childhood.

Recapitulation Theory

American psychologist and educator, Stanley Hall (1844-1924), posed the theory that play was a way for children to work through primitive atavisms, reflecting our evolutionary past. In other words, the child’s play habits at various stages were thought to be habits of past, primitive, civilizations persisting in the present. Compared to the adult, the child’s mental and moral capacity was a throwback to times pre-dating the ages of rationalism, science, and industrialism. His theory is one of the clearest examples of the impact nineteenth century evolutionism had on studies of children and play and influenced a number of theorists including Sigmund Freud.

Play and Psychoanalytic Theory

Sigmund Freud (1856-1938) believed play to be useful in the psychoanalytic treatment of children. Among some of his interpretations of children’s play were that it was a way for children to enact troubling life circumstances in order to master them and that children projected their anxieties or hostilities into their play. Freud, like Hall, believed that children passed through definite stages of development and that the conflicts unique to these stages were observable in the child’s play. His interpretations have been influential to the theory and practice of play therapy.

Ages and Stages Theory

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was interested in the development of knowledge in children and is considered one of the twentieth century’s most widely influential theorists of child development and play. According to Piaget, there were two aspects to the child’s cognition: ‘accommodation’ was the process through which the child adapted their mindset in response to an external demand, and ‘assimilation’ occurred when the child incorporated those elements of the external world into their own patterns of thought and behaviour. Both processes were said to exist in all actions, though in certain actions one may dominate the other. For example, during play Piaget believed accommodation to be predominant. Intelligent adaptation occurred when both accommodation and assimilation were in equilibrium. For Piaget, the development of play was congruous with the intellectual development of the child, meaning that at each stage of the child’s development there was a corresponding type of play activity. In Play Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, Piaget tries to show the congruent nature of his six stages of child development and the stages of a child’s play, based on observations of his own three children.

These early play theories gave credit to children’s play as more than a just a fanciful pastime; they may have differed or been explicitly opposed to one another, but they all assumed that play served an important purpose. This legacy has often been lamented: in the search for its deeper meaning, significance, or outcomes, play became primarily about development. The strongest criticism pointed against the classical theories is that although play was validated by theory, what counted as play was limited to what then seemed relevant to the so-called phases of child development. In The Ambiguity of Play, play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith argues that the study of children’s play historically has been so focused on the notion of progress that a culturally diverse range of play activities remain comparatively under theorized. For example, transgressive or subversive types of play that can’t easily be linked to desired outcomes are poorly understood and subsequently are often discouraged. Contemporary theories of rough and tumble, transgressive, or dark play have concluded that, although seemingly less desirable, they too are meaningful to the player. What the play means to the player along with the importance of broader socio-cultural contexts are passed over when play is reduced to a biological function.

Play scholars continue to theorize the biological drivers of children’s play; however, it’s becoming increasingly more common for play to be recognized as a culturally specific rather than a universal phenomenon. Similarly, childhood is now understood as a socio-cultural construct, meaning that the experience of being a child is not static and universal but variable across time and place. In other words, childhood is no longer considered purely a biological stage of development. Because the experiences of play and childhood are understood to be culturally specific rather than universal, emphasis can be placed on what play means for the child in the present rather than merely for the adult in the future. Theories of play have also extended beyond the individual child to groups of individuals within a diverse set of social conditions and cultural contexts that give rise to participation in play.

Many of the classical theories have fallen out of favour, but they continue to influence conventional wisdom about the purpose and value of play in the twenty-first century. For example, play is used in classrooms to enhance learning; play at recess gives children time to burn off energy between lessons; play with toys invites children to mimic adult behaviours such as mothering; playing team sports are said to be good for pro-social behaviour; playgrounds are believed to be where children learn about communication and problem solving; and play continues to be used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes by physicians and therapists. These are only some of the ways that theory, implicitly or explicitly, continues to influence where, when, why, and how children play.

A Challenge for Play Theory

Because play theory influences the provision of play, one of the many challenges for contemporary play scholars is ensuring that their influence remains relevant and supportive. Part of this challenge is that there has never been a consensus about what play is. Play has been described as an activity that is voluntary, set within its own boundaries, governed by its own rules, risky, utterly absorbing, non-serious, and non-productive. However play gets defined, disagreement is possible. Because of this, it is regularly noted that play resists definition—or in other words, play is ambiguous. Play has become even harder to define as digital media continue to complicate the way young people play. Add to this the multiple stakeholders invested in securing childhood and play—parents, teachers, doctors, and politicians—each with their own interests, and it becomes evident that reaching a consensus about what play is and what it’s for is a challenging if not impossible task.

Historically, a strong motivation for theorizing play has been to control and secure future outcomes. For politicians, educators, and reformers in the early 1900s theorists like Spencer, Groos, and Hall were particularly appealing because they offered evidence that play, when organized correctly, could improve the child. One of the central objectives of the early twentieth century playground movement was solving the problem of juvenile delinquency. Theory loaned itself to the belief that supervised playgrounds would not only give immigrant and poor children an alternative to playing in the streets, but would also lead to the reform of urban slums. Henry Curtis, the founder of the Playground Association of America and author of Education Through Play adopted the view that play must serve some greater purpose on account of the fact that it continues to exist despite the hard realities of life. By 1909, 55 million dollars had already been spent on playgrounds in the United States in the effort to improve the child. However, Curtis later observed that the playground movement was failing to live up to its ideals in part because play alone did not meet the practical needs of the child and city life.

Much like the playground movement of the early twentieth century, play continues to be imagined as part of the solution to a number of pressing social problems including childhood obesity, hyperactivity, and attention deficit disorders. Contemporary theories of play continue to support the belief that specific types of play can resolve these problems. For example, playgrounds continue to be recommended by experts on the basis that time spent outdoors decreases the likelihood of developing childhood diseases. However, play environments are significantly more complex than they were in the early 1900s; the ‘playground’ today might refer metaphorically to the digitally mediated environment of a massively multiplayer online game, to a mobile game played on a tablet or smartphone, or to the 360 degree immersive experience of wearing a virtual reality headset. These trends have prompted some to suggested that technology is responsible for a general decline or, worse even, a deficit in children’s play. Lamenting these trends, however, hasn’t changed the fact that digital technologies continue to be an important part of how young people live their lives in the twenty-first century. The fact that play for both children and adults is increasingly mediated by screens has required researchers to re-evaluate typical binaries such as traditional/digital in an effort to reach a more inclusive understanding of what counts as ‘good’ play. This is important because if play theory is influencing the improvement of children’s play, then how play is theorized continues to matter. The pervasiveness of digital technologies continues to present new challenges but also new opportunities for the future of play theory.

This is a draft of an article under review for publication by SAGE Publishing in the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies edited by Daniel T. Cook due for publication in 2019.