Play, Media and Children’s Playground Cultures

Abstract

Children’s play, as many have observed, can be elusive and puzzling to the adult eye. Roaming across different physical spaces, it poaches material from different sources, appearing often random and inchoate to adults used to the regulatory disciplines of sport and other games with transparent rule books. Sometimes, it is tactically obscure in its codes and practices. This scattered and confusing landscape presents us with profound and difficult questions about its purpose: our attempts to nail it to this or that function are often confounded, and it sometimes appears to be purely autotelic, as some have argued (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). It is, in a word, ambiguous, as Sutton-Smith has famously argued (Sutton-Smith, 1997). But his thesis is not only that play as a cultural phenomenon is ambiguous, it is also that adult perceptions and interpretations of it are split across disparate ‘rhetorics’. These derive in part from popular opinion, in part from academic study. The work presented in this book is broadly poised between two academic disciplines, and the research traditions they represent. One is folklore studies, in its contemporary form and in relation to nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, particularly that of Iona (1923–) and Peter Opie (1918–82). The Opies’ work on children’s play in the UK was pioneering in terms of its scope, methods and rigour, and remains both a monumental achievement and an indispensable point of reference.