In This Issue

Do children play in times of war? How do they adapt to the conflict around them? According to the latest issue of the American Journal of Play, some children do play—often in clandestine ways—in times of violence, and the presence of play and games showcases the significance of play as a means of coping with traumatic experiences. In the article, “Children’s Play in the Shadow of War,” author Daniel Feldman, lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, explores the contemporary conflict in Syria and the past atrocities of the Holocaust to examine the precarious nature of play during times of violence, how children adapt their playing, and its therapeutic benefits.

Current Issue

Interview

Reflections on Roughhousing and Living Playfully: An Interview with Anthony T. DeBenedet
Overview

Anthony T. DeBenedet, M.D. is a practicing physician in Ann Arbor, MI, and a behavioral-science enthusiast. His interviews and writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME Ideas, on the Today show, and elsewhere. He is the author of Playful Intelligence: The Power of Living Lightly in a Serious World (2018), a book about the surprising ways that playfulness affects adulthood; and he coauthored The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs It (2011), a book about the importance of parent-child physical play in parenting. DeBenedet has a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Duke University, an M.S. in health and health care research from the University of Michigan, and an M.D. from the University of Virginia. He completed his internal medicine residency and gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Michigan Health System. Key words: adult playfulness; emotional intelligence; playful intelligence; rough-and-tumble play; roughhousing; social play; Sasuke

Articles

Children’s Play in the Shadow of War

by Daniel Feldman

Abstract

The author demonstrates that war places children’s play under acute stress but does not eliminate it. He argues that the persistence of children’s play and games during periods of armed conflict reflects the significance of play as a key mode for children to cope with conditions of war. Episodes of children’s play drawn from the recent Syrian Civil War illustrate the precariousness and importance of children’s play and games during contemporary armed conflict and focus attention on children’s play as a disregarded casualty of war. The article compares the state of underground children’s play in con- temporary Syria with the record of clandestine games played by children in the Holocaust to substantiate its claim that children adapt their play to concretize and comprehend traumatic wartime experience. The article posits that play is both a target of war and a means of therapeutically contending with mass violence. Key words: play and trauma; play therapy; Syrian Civil War; the Holocaust; underground play; war play

Profiles of Playful Men and Playful Women: Personality and Humor-Related Attributes

by Lynn A. Barnett

Abstract

Research about playfulness in adults has viewed it as something that ema- nates from personality and other individualized characteristics, and therefore many previous studies adopted a trait approach to predict playfulness, largely ignoring gender differences. The author conducted a facet-level analysis of the so-called big-five personality predictors and of four humor-related attri- butes and analyzed whether playfulness should be considered individually or compositely. She generated hypotheses from the extant literature and sur- veyed hundreds of undergraduates to discover characteristics distinctly dif- ferent between the playfulness of young adult men and women. Keywords: adult playfulness; gender and play; personality and play

From Displays and Dioramas to Doll Dramas: Adult World Building and World Playing with Toys

by Katriina Heljakka and J. Tuomas Harviainen

Abstract

Toys both guide and foster the play—and stimulate the imaginations—of players of all ages. The authors investigate adult use of toys as a point of entry to the world play of both transmedia-connected and stand alone toy characters—dolls, action figures, and soft toys. They point to how adult toy players engage actively in world building in their world play and suggest that play better describes the object relations of adults with toys than such notions as collecting or pursuing a hobby. They discuss how adults use world playing with toys to develop toy industry back stories and replay—and sometimes revolutionize—original story lines familiar from popular fiction. And they highlight how mature audiences for character toys employ these physical objects to explore their capacity for imaginative, spatial, and hybrid world play. Key words: adult play and creativity; object play; object relations; photo play; social media and adult play; social play; toys; toy play; world building; world play

Video Games and English as a Second Language: The Effect of Massive Multiplayer Online Video Games on the Willingness to Communicate and Communicative Anxiety of College Students in Puerto Rico

by Kenneth S. Horowitz

Abstract

The informal setting of online multiplayer video games may offer safe spots for speakers of other languages learning English to practice their communi- cation skills and reduce their anxiety about using a second language. In this study, the author examined the relationship between both these concerns and the time spent playing such games by basic and intermediate English-as-a- second-language (ESL) college students in Puerto Rico. The results indicated a statistically significant relationship between them, supporting previous studies that establish a relationship between online multiplayer video game play and increased confidence and lowered anxiety about using English among second-language learners. Key words: affective filter; communica- tive anxiety (CA); English as a second language (ESL); massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG); willingness to communicate (WTC)

Book Reviews

Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids

by Howard Chudacoff

Alexandra Lange packs a lot into this engaging, informative, and provocative book. At various points throughout, one can find insights into architectural history, social history, child development, environmental history, urban planning, material science, even autobiography. A design critic married to an architect, Lange has built a highly respected career assessing things and places, especially those involving domestic life. And when she had her first child—she dedicates the book to her two children—she became especially fascinated by children’s stuff (her italics), not just commercial toys but what, how, and where kids used stuff beyond the home, in school, in playgrounds, and in their larger community. If designed and used properly, Lange concludes—and she does not
take an entirely uncritical stance—these things and places have high educational value: a child’s environment, she argues, can be what educational philosopher Loris Malaguzzi has called “the third teacher,” as important to learning as the home and the school.

Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play

by M. Kristana Textor

In this book Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), leads readers through his career in designing and studying learning experiences with youth. Lifelong Kindergarten is structured around the themes of projects, passion, peers, and play as they relate to the cultivation of creativity. He presents the creative learning kindergartners exude as a spiral that follows the acts of imagining, creating, playing, sharing, and reflecting. The ultimate message in Lifelong Kindergarten is that creative thinking can be carried into aspects of our lives as learners beyond that playful, joyful, but all-too-brief kindergarten school year.

Lisa Dion, Aggression in Play Therapy: A Neurobiological Approach for Integrating Intensity

by David A. Crenshaw

A small volume and easy to read, Lisa Dion’s book is packed with clinical wisdom. Written primarily for play therapists, it is of interest to scholars of play, child- development and mental-health practitioners, and early-childhood educators. The author has built on the groundbreaking work of Bonnie Badenoch (who wrote the foreword to the book) to provide play therapists with a clear and highly understandable rationale for integrating interpersonal neurobiology into their work in the playroom. Theresa Kestly’s The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Play: Brain-Building Interventions for Emotional Well- Being (2014) also deserves mention for its contributions on the literature about the interpersonal neurobiology of play.

Douglas A. Guerra, Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America

by Chris Dingwall

“Games are about invention itself.” Douglas A. Guerra puts this proposition to a rigorous test in Slantwise Moves: Games, Literature, and Social Invention in Nineteenth-Century America. By drawing from the careers of preeminent game designers such as Milton Bradley, William Simmons, and Anne W. Abbot, Guerra reconsiders several landmarks of midcentury American literature as archives of social performance—Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857), The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum (1855), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852). In many ways, this is a book less about games than about how games can illuminate the social meaning of literary works. Readers expecting a detailed survey of nineteenth-century board games and parlor games will likely be frustrated; at times, the author is more engaged with critical theory than with the relevant historiography and material culture. Yet Guerra’s approach not only enriches our understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century games, it yields a productive—if unwieldy—framework for extending the field of game studies beyond the material culture of formal game play.

Eric Klopfer, Jason Haas, Scot Osterweil, and Louisa Rosenheck, Resonant Games: Design Principles for Learning Games that Connect Hearts, Minds, and the Everyday

by Elena Bertozzi

The field of educational game design and development in digital media is still young and rapidly evolving. Emerging technologies provide new possibilities for content, deployment, and means of distribution. This plethora of opportunities has unfortunately also fostered the development of many products being labeled “educational games” without any fact-based foundation for making this claim. Even the terminology for how to describe this kind of work seems constantly in flux. Games that seek to educate players and change post-game player behavior may be called serious games, games for impact, games for change, and applied games (among other terms). This volume seeks to establish a rigorous foundation and clear guidelines for practice to enable the production of what the authors call “resonant” games—games that “create deep learning experiences inextricably connected to the educational ecosystem they exist in” (p. 3).

Paolo Ruffino, Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture

by Anastasia Salter

In the introduction to Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture, Paolo Ruffino notes that the game industry has been obsessed with predicting its own future as a force for world changing even as it is in the midst of an identity crisis (and, notably, a labor crisis). The narrative of games is certainly forward facing: whole conventions are dedicated to revealing the next big thing. Yet optimistic views of a continually progressive future for gaming do not reconcile well with a cultural moment that includes “gamergate”—a culture war over “gamer” identity that started with an attack on game designer Zoe Quinn by an ex-partner and escalated to include attacks on feminist or inclusive voices in game design, journalism, and academia—and its lingering, inescapable, aftermath. Ruffino notes that “these stories about the medium only hide the complexi- ties of the problems they seek to resolve and are reassuring precisely because they do not change anything” (p. 6). Ruffino offers his approach to creative game stud- ies as an antidote to the repetitiveness of some of the narratives of the game industry perpetuated in games academia, and as such the volume acts not so much as a history of its own but as a manifesto calling for renewed attention to the potential value of game studies as a field of inquiry.