The Ambiguity of Play (Sutton-Smith, 2001)

The Ambiguity of Play (Sutton-Smith, 2001)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Serious scholarship on the not-so-serious topic of play, March 29, 2000
By felicia mcmahon (Syracuse University)

In a novel approach to an understanding of the everyday phenomenon that we call "play," Professor Sutton-Smith tackles this slippery subject by analyzing the persuasive techniques that researchers use to define play. "We all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness," claims Sutton-Smith. In his attempt to bring some coherence to past scholarship of the ambiguous field of play studies, Sutton-Smith not only challenges conventional definitions of play but manages somehow to succinctly summarize all major and minor theorists in a mere 231 pages. The text is laced with numerous examples to support Sutton-Smith's contention that all theories of play to date fall into one of seven rhetorical categories. He clearly points to the problem of consensus on the definition of play in a field that is divided among different disciplines each claiming that its own kind of play is the one that is central to the phenomenon. Although the book is not directed to a popular audience, it is an excellent text for classroom use in many academic disciplines.

p.21 This [waking consciousness is dreaming, but dreaming constrained by external reality] might mean that an infant or animal is "wired" to fantasize at all times, and the act of play is in the first place an extrusion of internal mental fantasy into the web of external constraints... Again, the internal or passively received fantasy can manifest itself only in terms of the external and actively controlled play to which the child has access. Fantasy play that is rooted in the mind is, in these terms, actively converted into what is observed as playful behavior.

p.61 play seems to be driven by the novelties, excitements, or anxieties that are most urgent to the players. Put in these terms, play might imitate the fluidity and value-driven character of the mind's own internal processing, but with a transference to the agencies, agents, acts, and spatiotemporal scenes of the external world. Play is, as it were, a halfway house between the night and the day, the brain and the world.

p.149 the imagination makes unique models of the world, some of which lead us to anticipate useful changes... the flexibility of the imagination, of play, and of the playful is the ultimate guarantor of our survival.

p.214 This work begins with the announcement by experts that, theoretically speaking, play is difficult to understand because it is ambiguous.

p.221 Stephen Jay Gould who in his recent work Full House [JLJ - a citation error, the actual work cited is apparently Gould, Creating the Creators In: Discover 17 (1996), pp 43-54]... cites variability rather than precision of adaptation, as the central characteristic of biological evolution. He writes:

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction. In our world of radically and unpredictably changing environments, and evolutionary potential for creative responses requires that organisms possess an opposite set of characteristics usually devalued in our culture: sloppiness, broad potential, quirkiness, unpredictability, and, above all, massive redundancy, The key is flexibility, not admirable precision (p.44)

Gould goes on to discuss three basic principles of such evolutionary variability, and although he is not talking about play, the match between his account and contemporary descriptions of play is striking.

p.229 So in conclusion, I have presented here the view that variability is the key to play, and that structurally play is characterized by quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility.