American Journal of Play最新文献

{"title":"Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America","authors":"Matthew Wittmann","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-3465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-3465","url":null,"abstract":"Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America Victoria W. Wolcott Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Notes, index, images. 310 pp. $25.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780812244342Victoria Wolcott's study of urban rec- reation and the civil-rights movement begins with an epigraph from Martin Luther King's \"Letter from Birmingham Jail\" that describes the tears of his daugh- ter upon being told that Funtown, an amusement park in Atlanta, was \"closed to colored children.\" The quote effectively introduces Wolcott's central argument, which asserts that the struggle against the segregation of recreational facilities, primarily swimming pools, roller skating rinks, and amusements parks, played an important role in the history of the civil- rights movement. Wolcott's history of \"rec- reation riots,\" what she defines as \"racial conflicts in spaces of leisure,\" covers both well-known events like the Orangesburg massacre, which stemmed from efforts by students at South Carolina State College to desegregate a local bowling alley, to a series of lesser-known, but significant struggles at recreation sites ranging from Cincin- nati's Coney Island amusement park to the Skateland rink in Cleveland and the public pools and beaches of Baltimore. The work both complements and extends the recent historiography of race relations and urban history in the United States by criticizing the \"myth of Southern exceptionalism,\" calling attention to the long battles over the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and emphasizing the fundamental role that white violence played in sustain- ing segregation.The book begins with an examina- tion of the early decades of the twentieth century, a \"tarnished golden age\" when commercial leisure spaces were racialized and segregated by a combination of legal and extralegal means, despite black resis- tance. During the 1940s, the rise of racial liberalism and the renewed efforts of black activists produced very uneven outcomes. The successful integration of places like Detroit's Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park was offset by growing white resistance in the form of increased and overt violence against African Americans agitating for change and the proliferation of strategies to avoid desegregation, most notably by making public recreational facilities pri- vate to avoid legal entanglements and by simply closing them down altogether.Although Wolcott's analysis cov- ers events from around the country, it is perhaps strongest in her middle chapters, which focus specifically on the efforts of a committed group of activists to chal- lenge segregation at Coney Island outside of Cincinnati and the impact of a 1956 recreation riot on the city of Buffalo and the Crystal Beach Amusement Park. She explores the complicated political coali- tions and legal maneuvering that so often characterized the desegregation strug- gle, while also highlighting the bravery of individual activists and citizens like Juanita ","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"6 1","pages":"415"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71140959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity","authors":"D. Bergen","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-4734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-4734","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"6 1","pages":"410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71145518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America","authors":"Susan J Matt","doi":"10.1093/JAHIST/JAU126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JAHIST/JAU126","url":null,"abstract":"Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America Amy F. Ogata Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013. Introduction, images, notes, bibliography, index. 229 pp. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780816679614In Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, Amy F. Ogata shows how a cultural preoccupation with childhood creativity leftits mark on American material life. While the idea of the child as naturally creative first emerged in the eighteenth century and grew steadily during the nineteenth, it was only in the twentieth century that it took root across America. The belief that children were naturally creative, and that their creative sensibilities could be further nurtured and expanded by exposing them to stimulating environments and objects spread rapidly during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, particularly among middle- and upper-class Americans.Ogata explains that childhood creativity became a subject of pervasive concern because of social tensions related to America's Cold War with the Soviet Union. During that era, many social commentators investigated the effects of child rearing on political culture. For instance, anthropologist Margaret Mead suggested that Soviet children were trained to accept ideology without question, whereas American boys and girls had greater liberty of thought. Mead was not alone, and many experts believed that the key to winning the Cold War was to ensure that the rising generation was flexible, innovative, and open to exploration. The creative child also offered a comforting alternative to sociologist William Whyte's \"Organization Man,\" the embodiment of conformity and conventional living. Child-rearing experts proposed that with proper training and encouragement, youth might develop into something other than the herd-like creatures of David Riesman's \"lonely crowd.\" And, some hoped, creative children, who could find new ways to amuse themselves and who were trained to think independently, might be able to resist the seductive lure of American mass culture that played incessantly on their television screens.Ogata's book is well researched, well written, and beautifully illustrated-and truly innovative in its depiction of how a generation of toy designers, architects, and museum curators gave shape to their faith in youthful creativity. Whether it was the flexible, bendable Gumby, the simple and unadorned wooden toys of Playskool, the school designs of Saarinen and other midcentury architects, the playrooms and spaces enshrined in many newly built houses, or the children's art carnivals put on by the Museum of Modern Art, the goal of fostering youthful creativity was embodied in an array of objects, buildings, and installations that still exist today. Often we take for granted these designs, giving scant consideration to their pedagogical and psychological goals, yet undergirding them were larger hopes for the development of an intellectually agile and inventive citizenry","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"1 1","pages":"408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82929417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance","authors":"S. Grimes","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6166","url":null,"abstract":"Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual PerformanceKiri MillerNew York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Notes, references, index. 272 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199753468From Double Dutch to limbo competitions, games that meld music, performance, and play are easy to find. In more recent years, the rise and spread of digital technologies have given way to a whole new, and ever-widening, range of practices that combine, recombine, and expand upon this tradition. This is particularly true of digital games (video games, arcade games, and computer games) in which music has long fulfilled a core function, both in terms of adding significantly to games' narratives and aesthetics, as well as providing an intuitive way of giving feedback to players. Some of the early arcade games had soundtracks that contained hidden clues about the right time to make a particular move or that forewarned players they were running out of time or were about to experience a change of speed. More recently, rhythm games, such as PaRappa the Rapper (1996) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998), have incorporated beat as a core component of their game-play mechanics-where a player's moves are only successful if made in musical time. As digital games have become more social (and more socially acceptable), events such as weekly Rock Band competitions at the local pub and sharing a musical creation made in the game Sound Shapes (2012) with thousands of other players online are increasingly common.Kiri Miller's Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance is a timely and important work that tackles multiple aspects of the complex intermingling of music, performance, and play that is currently taking place within digital culture. The book features a range of relevant examples and draws important linkages between contempo rary and traditional leisure practices. The results of the author's own research in this area-which includes interviews with players, ethnographic fieldwork and firsthand experimentation with the games and practices involved-are described in close detail in three parts, divided by the case study or practice examined. Part 1 examines the highly popular and controversial single-player console game Grand TheftAuto: San Andreas (2004), in which music plays an integral role not only in setting the tone for game play, but also within the players' own in-game identity performance and role-play experiences. Part 2 focuses on music-performance games Guitar Hero (2005) and Rock Band (2007) and delves into some of the uncomfortable questions these games arguably raise about issues of authenticity (playing music) and consumerism (playing at playing music). Last, part 3 considers some of the ways leisure activities are learned and taught through YouTube and other social media, as well as how such tools are increasingly used to establish new, leisure-based communities of practice. Playing Along also comes with a companion website, which features a series o","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"6 1","pages":"292"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71138115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Childhood in World History","authors":"E. Tsagaris","doi":"10.4324/9781315561363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315561363","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"6 1","pages":"149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2013-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.4324/9781315561363","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70650323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pretending to Play or Playing to Pretend: The Case of Autism.","authors":"Connie Kasari, Ya-Chih Chang, Stephanie Patterson","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>An article by Angeline S. Lillard and others published in the January 2013 issue of <i>Psychological Bulletin</i> about the impact of pretend play on child development raised a number of issues about play studies and child psychology. They claimed that, contrary to current theories on the subject, the evidence of many studies does not support causal explanations of play's relationship to most childhood development. In this article, authors Kasari, Chang, and Patterson review these arguments about play and devlopment in relation to children with autism-children who show specific deficits in pretend play. They argue that the study of these children provides a unique opportunity to consider which elements in play are important and how play skills are associated with different periods of child development. They conclude that, because pretend play requires intervention for the majority of children with autism, improving pretense in these children may shed more light on the causal impact of pretense on later developing skills in children. Key words: child development and pretend play; children with autism; funtional play; intervention in play; symbol play.</p>","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"6 1","pages":"124-135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4662258/pdf/nihms654216.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9344011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reinventing Childhood after World War II","authors":"James Marten","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6482","url":null,"abstract":"Reinventing Childhood after World War II Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Contents, notes, index. 182 pp. $42.50 paper. ISBN: 9780812243673How many historians does it take to write an insightful, provocative, scholarly, and readable little book that will help stu- dents and historians alike understand the contexts in which the history and histo- riographies of children and youth have developed over the last half century? In this case, seven-the number who con- tributed to this model of purposeful collaboration that stakes a claim for the potential of history as a tool to explore and even influence public attitudes about and government policies toward children.If not quite seamless, the book is nevertheless tightly organized. Paula Fass focuses on the creation of a generation of anxious parents and children as more mothers went to work, divorce rates grew, schools worsened, and drugs became available to control child behaviors. Michael Grossberg explains how children's \"rights\" at first widened (the 1954 school desegregation decision, for instance) and then narrowed (due to censorship and worries about sexual predators). Steven Mintz explores the commercialization of children's culture and the growing belief that children's pastimes required less imagination than in the past (he also partly debunks that notion). Stephen Las- sonde argues that, while the first postwar generation grew up with clear coming- of-age markers, the commercialization of childhood, the increasing awareness of psychological and eating disorders, and the exposure to sex and violence all com- bined to \"compress\" childhood, even as other cultural trends have caused adults to extend their own childhoods. Mary Ann Mason examines the difficulty of fitting the notion of the \"best interests of the child\" into the constantly shifting defi- nitions of family with the emergence of surrogate motherhood, gay adoption, and other new or newly accepted technologies and concepts. Kriste Lindenmeyer suggests that the American Dream became differ- ent things for postwar children and their parents and led the federal government to build programs intended to level the play- ing field for all children. And Bengt Sandin offers a Swedish perspective in which chil- dren's rights became a dominant priority of the central government and children's lives became a state responsibility in ways that Americans could hardly imagine.One of the most important threads running through the essays is anxiety: Par- ents worried about giving their children too much or too little freedom; Govern- ment officials worried about creating a class of permanently dependent citizens; Cultural critics worried about child con- sumerism and about forcing (or allowing) children to grow up too fast; Traditional- ists worried about expanding construc- tions of families; And, for more than half the period covered by the book, everyone worried about the Soviet threat an","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"5 1","pages":"259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71138526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture","authors":"L. Luo","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-3114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-3114","url":null,"abstract":"Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture Andrew F. Jones Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Contents, notes, appendix, glossary of terms, index, images. 259 pp. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780674047952Andrew F. Jones's fascinating and beautifully written book should be read by all those interested in childhood, toys, fairy tales, and the discourse of development and its vernacularization in specific cul tural contexts. A specialist in modern Chinese culture, Jones's earlier book, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age, was a study of popular music and media culture in Shanghai during the first decades of the twentieth century (Jones 2001). In Developmental Fairly Tales, Jones again weaves together a study of Chinese modernity- this time using one of its most important intellectuals, Lu Xun. This book is as much a monograph on Lu Xun as it is a dynamic examination of his generation's evolutionary thinking. An emphasis on the pedagogical function of culture in its vernacular forms-newspaper article, popular magazine, children's premier, film, and fairy tale-supplies the intellectual link between Jones's earlier work and the current book.The author's effort to restore the child and the beast to a central place in the narration of Chinese modernity is not without precedents. For Lu Xun and his generation, writing about the child and the beast was writing about the endangered nation. Chinese intellectuals and educators used the child and the beast as instruments to think through the issue of development. Jones joins a long tradition of intellectual inquiry into the underprivileged and the disadvantaged, a move that simultaneously confirms and challenges the evolutionary thinking prevalent in the history and historiography of modern Chinese culture. Jones's consistent attention to \"the folk\" is another manifestation of such interest, as he points out in a recent interview which appeared in a November 30, 2011, issue of New Books in East Asian Studies about his next project, a return to popular music and media culture in Maindesire land China and Taiwan in the 1960s.In defining \"development\" as \"a way of knowing, narrating, and attempting to manage processes of radical historical change\" (p. 3) and situating the child and the beast at the center of such processes, Jones radically revises our understanding of modern Chinese cultural development by highlighting vernacular materials (such as children's literature) and their complex engagement with the dilemmas of colonial modernity in China. The crisis of agency, as Jones points out, runs through Lu Xun and his generation's grappling with developmentalist thought (p. …","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"5 1","pages":"266"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71136503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect","authors":"I. Bogost","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-6927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-6927","url":null,"abstract":"The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke New York: Welcome Books, 2012. Contents, images, credits. 215 pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098The Art of Video Games, by Chris Melissinos and Patrick O'Rourke, published in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is a catalog and companion to a high-profile exhibition of the same name that opened at the Smithsonian facility in Washington, DC, in 2012 and is scheduled to travel to many regional museums. This is a lushly illustrated coffee-table book that offers readers full-page, color photographs and succinct summaries of video games, descriptions of their significance, and interviews with many of their creators. Slick and gorgeous, the book offers an important permanent, widely distributable, inexpensive complement to the exhibition.Given the noise the Smithsonian exhibition has stirred up, the bar was high for Melissinos and O'Rourke: the authors needed to prove video games worthy of the moniker \"art\" and of their standing as part of the \"record of the American experience,\" to pull a quote from the museum's publicity. But for those of us who have long been making, studying, using, and advocating for video games, the mere fact of the exhibit and its publication counts as a success-not so much because the likes of game designers David Crane and Ron Gilbert now find a place beside artists David Hockney and Mary Cassatt, but because video games do belong in a record of the American experience. Melissinos and O'Rourke deserve praise for having spearheaded the project.Beyond that abstract victory, The Art of Video Games is a bittersweet triumph for those with a more nuanced interest in and understanding of video game history. The book's organization of the history of video games into five eras offers an admirable summary of the key trends and shifts in the gaming landscape. Of course, so did earlier illustrated histories such as Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson's High Score! The Illustrated History of Video Games (McGraw Hill, 2002), though the latter never reached beyond the enthusiast and is now out of print.But while the shiny pages and fullcolor spreads telegraph official approval, the content is sometimes incomplete and inaccurate. I will pick as an example something I know well, the 1977 Atari Video Computer System (VCS), also known as the Atari 2600. The authors get a lot right. Their coverage of VCS titles such as Pitfall! and the Atari port of Pac-Man, for example, discusses the important technical and historical situations that influenced the creation of these games. But they are less sure-footed in their discussion of Combat, the pack-in title that shipped with the Atari VCS in 1977. They correctly identify it as a port of the Key Games title Tank, but they also draw the conclusion that \"developers were just starting to learn how to wring experience from the new platform. As such, Combat was a two-player activity with no computer-","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"5 1","pages":"128"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71138266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pretend play, coping, and subjective well-being in children: A follow-up study.","authors":"Julie A. Fiorelli, S. Russ","doi":"10.1037/e700772011-001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1037/e700772011-001","url":null,"abstract":"Researchers, the authors state, link play to cognitive and affective processes important for a child's development and overall well-being. In this article, the authors examine the relationships involving pretend play, coping, and subjective well-being (the last of which they conceptualize as positive affect-positive mood-and life satisfaction) and investigate the stability and predictive power of play skills. They report on a study in which they measured the pretend play, coping skills, positive affect, and life satisfaction of thirty girls in kindergarten through fourth grade and compared these measures to the girls' pretend play eighteen months earlier.They found that affect or emotional themes in play related to positive mood in daily life and that imagination and organization in play related to coping ability. Their results, they concluded, also support the stability of imagination and organization in pretend play over time. Key words: coping skills; divergent thinking; imagination in play; make-believe; organization in play; pretend play; subjective well-beingResearch consistently demonstrates that, through play, children develop cognitive and affective processes important for overall functioning. Pretend play relates to and facilitates processes-divergent thinking, insight, imagination, and affect expression-relevant to creativity and creative problem solving (Dansky 1980; Fisher 1992; Moore and Russ 2008; Russ and Grossman-McKee 1990). As children learn to solve problems and think creatively, they cope better and improve their ability to adjust to life's situations (Christiano and Russ 1996). In addition, because play has an impact on the cognitive and affective processes important for development, it also has an effect on a child's subjective well-being. We conceptualize subjective well-being as a combination of life satisfaction and positive affect.The study we present in this article, then, investigated and assessed the relationships involving pretend play, subjective well-being (i.e. the constructs of life satisfaction and positive affect [positive mood]), and coping. In addition, we investigated the predictive power of play-specifically, how play predicted subjective well-being, coping, and, later, play ability.Pretend PlayAlthough play is, of course, a multidimensional construct with meanings that vary in different contexts (Cohen 2006), our study examined pretend play, also called imaginative play, make-believe play, fantasy play, and dramatic play. This type of play involves the use of fantasy, make-believe, and symbolism (Fein 1981). Pretend play possesses an element of \"as if \" -meaning that one thing represents or stands in for something else (Fein 1987). Udwin (1983) defines it as the ability to engage in play, to transform objects, and to use make-believe action (Udwin 1983).In a review of the literature, Sandra Russ (2004) identified a number of cognitive and affective processes involved in play. Through play, children develo","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"5 1","pages":"81-103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57934888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}