p.1 play is the laboratory of the possible. To play fully and imaginatively is to step
sideways into another reality... Things are dismantled and built anew.
p.3 no discipline has moved this topic [the study of human play] to the center of its theoretical or research
tradition or otherwise claimed its ownership.
p.4 I argue that play studies has been dominated by the perspectives and concerns of certain disciplines
within the social and behavioral sciences. These disciplines in my view are education, psychology, folklore, animal and behavioral
studies, and anthropology... In what follows, I do not dispute the continuing importance of these fields but rather argue
that these traditions need to be supplemented and integrated with other approaches.
p.6 play studies has tended to reflect an idealistic, somewhat romantic vision of the human being. Central
to this vision is the belief that people - and especially young children - are naturally active and curious. If only we release
them from the drudgery of routine social existence, they will fashion wonderful new worlds. Using their own sense of what
is intrinsically satisfying as a guide, children will pull themselves upward.
p.12 In play, we are able to choose courses of action and to adjust those courses based on the internal
satisfactions we receive.
p.95 At the most obvious level, play needs what Lieberman (1977) has called "playfulness," a set
of creative, inquisitive orientations on the part of the players themselves.
p.110 Simmel realized that humans encounter the world fundamentally through the construction and employment
of symbolic forms... Like Marx, Simmel described human connections in terms of tension, distance, and alienation.
p.130 At one level, this means that play is an interaction of individual life with the objectified
forms of the world. We appraise and manipulate these forms; we test their solidity by trying to evade their influence... play
always has a tentative, oppositional quality.
p.146 Like poker players concealing and then revealing their cards, people in every situation display information
about themselves quite strategically.
p.154 The opposite of this is a state of social awkwardness he... terms "tension". Tension, as used here,
does not mean the quality of tenseness or uncertainty in play. Instead tension refers to a player's perception of discrepancy
- between the world that one embraces spontaneously and the world one is obliged to dwell in.
p.156 Goffman notes that games hold people's attention because they are a kind of work in progress.
p.188 For his part, Huizinga (1955, pp.46-75) takes the somewhat different position that play is
essentially an attempt to engage the world, to pull other people or objects into special patterns
of communication or interaction... The playful orientation is not so much a quest for control as
an invitation to the world to enter a pattern of confrontation and rivalry... "winning" - becomes less important than the
interaction process itself.
p.191 the playful project is not only to stir up these monsters inside us but also to see how well
we react to them and whether we can control their powers.
p.192 Critically then, players not only register and respond to their own sensations but seek them out in
an active way. On the basis of such satisfactions, play is sustained... We commit ourselves to actions in the world and survey
the effects of those actions
p.218 As Simmel recognized so well, it is in that tension-filled space between connection and disconnection
that play lives. Like freedom itself, play is an inquiry into the meaning of marginality.
