American Journal of Play最新文献

{"title":"Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan","authors":"Andrew C. Mckevitt","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-1032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-1032","url":null,"abstract":"Children as Treasures: Childhood and the Middle Class in Early Twentieth-Century Japan Mark A. Jones Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Contents, notes, works cited, index. 407 pp. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780674053342In the last decade, scholars in a range of fields have explored the rich child-centered world of contemporary Japanese consumer culture. Works like Anne Allison's Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2005) and Joseph Tobin's edited collection, Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon (2004), have illustrated the ways contemporary Japanese children live in a world full of imaginative playthings linked to powerful currents of national culture and global commerce. Scholars know much less, however, about the origins of one of the world's most influential play cultures. We also understand little about how Japanese children's pervasive popular culture conflicts with an apparent national obsession with entrance examinations and juku (cram schools). Mark A. Jones's ambitious Children as Treasures provides a welcome history of childhood in Japan in the first decades of the twentieth century. Jones embeds his examination of childraising practices within a complicated background of changing class identities, arguing that the \"rearing of children became the defining emblem of middleclass identity in early twentieth-century Japan\" (p. 2).There are really two stories in Children as Treasures-one about the shaping of a middle class in early twentieth-century Japan and the other about emerging popular and intellectual conceptions of childhood-and Jones deftly weaves the two together. The book is also divided chronologically between a first half on the late Meiji period (1880s to 1912) and a second half on the Taisho period (1912 to 1926), which preceded the authoritarian militarism of the early Showa period. During the late Meiji era, established elites fashioned a vision of the middle class as the social foundation for a national community rooted in morality rather than materialism, reflecting anxieties about rapid growth in urban spaces and materialist desires. In this context, the image of the ryosai kenbo, the \"good wife, wise mother,\" was charged with shaping a generation of shokokumin, or \"little citizens,\" who were \"morally virtuous and physically vigorous, a symbol of a sound family, a sturdy middle class, and a strong nation\" (p. 147). The later Taisho era witnessed the expansion of an education system that provided new opportunities for social mobility as well as the growth of a mass media catering to middle-class aspirants, which resulted in new pressures that reshaped both the image of the middle class and that of the ideal child. Through the 1920s, two visions of childhood competed for the attention of parents: the yutosei, or the \"superior student,\" and the kodomorashii kodomo, or the \"childlike child.\" By the end of the Taisho era, the image of the yutosei-a disciplined child wh","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"5 1","pages":"124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71134752","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":"Handbook of Children and the Media","authors":"Warren Buckleitner","doi":"10.5860/choice.38-4163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-4163","url":null,"abstract":"Handbook of Children and the Media Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer, eds. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2012. Tables, charts, indexes. 803 pp. $150.00 cloth. isbn: 978141298249\"Sir, is this your bag?\" The TSA agent looked serious. \"Yes,\" I responded, surprised. As a frequent traveler, I have become adapt at moving smoothly through airport screening lines. Why was my laptop-free bag being searched? She reached in my bag and pulled out the second edition of Singer and Singer's Handbook of Children and the Media. To my amazement, she dropped the heavy 803-page hardcover onto a stainless steel examination table and began carefully swiping the inside pages for explosive residue. She told me the thick hardcover was blocking the x-ray machine's view of my bag's contents.This raises some questions. If a hardcover book is an outlier for our national airport security system, are the ideas it contains-frozen in ink and on paper- equally as troublesome? Or does this heavy book achieve its intellectually heavy goal \"to review, through the contributions of research experts, the past and potential future impact of the electronic media on growing children\" (p. 3). The answer is yes to both questions.The book meets its goal in part due to the skill, experience, and deep scholarly connections of the editors-Jerome and Dorothy Singer, the Yale-based husbandand- wife team who have been conducting and reviewing research on children's television since 1961, when former Federal Communications Commission chair man Newton Minnow called the medium a vast wasteland. The historical frame, which stretches back to media as cave drawings, is provided in the introduction as well as in each of three sections, containing, in all, thirty-five articles from sixty-four researchers. Short biographies, with research interests and university affiliations, appear for each, which makes it possible to spot that all but three writers come from the United States.Part 1is the largest and the most useful part of the book, with twenty-three articles loosely organized under the heading \"The Popular Media as Educators and Socializers of Growing Children.\" Its buffet of themes have appeared throughout television-inspired discourse for the last sixty years, many massaged here, sans specifics, to account for new digital media. Many of the articles follow a similar pattern: they state that older children are spending vast amounts of time-seven hours and thirty-eight minutes per day, to cite Vicky Ridout's 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation survey-with various forms of media, and then they look at what this means from different angles. The well-worn media worries are present and accounted for, including video game violence (Anderson, Gentile, and Dill), reducing (or enhancing) creativity (Valkenburg and Calvert), food marketing (Battle Horgen, Harris, and Brownell), gender stereotyping (Signorielli), advertising (Kunkel and Castonguay), and drugs (Strasburger). …","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"4 1","pages":"506"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71085816","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":"Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming","authors":"T. L. Taylor","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-1511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-1511","url":null,"abstract":"Competitive video and computer game play is nothing new: the documentary King of Kong memorably portrays a Donkey Kong player's attempts to achieve the all-time highest score; the television show Starcade (1982--1984) featured competitions among arcade game players; and first-person shooter games of the 1990s became multiplayer through network play. A new development in the world of digital gaming, however, is the emergence of professional computer game play, complete with star players, team owners, tournaments, sponsorships, and spectators. In Raising the Stakes, T. L. Taylor explores the emerging scene of professional computer gaming and the accompanying efforts to make a sport out of this form of play. In the course of her explorations, Taylor travels to tournaments, including the World Cyber Games Grand Finals (which considers itself the computer gaming equivalent of the Olympics), and interviews participants from players to broadcasters. She examines pro-gaming, with its highly paid players, play-by-play broadcasts, and mass audience; discusses whether or not e-sports should even be considered sports; traces the player's path from amateur to professional (and how a hobby becomes work); and describes the importance of leagues, teams, owners, organizers, referees, sponsors, and fans in shaping the structure and culture of pro-gaming. Taylor connects professional computer gaming to broader issues: our notions of play, work, and sport; the nature of spectatorship; the influence of money on sports. And she examines the ongoing struggle over the gendered construction of play through the lens of male-dominated pro-gaming. Ultimately, the evolution of professional computer gaming illuminates the contemporary struggle to convert playful passions into serious play.","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71139207","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":"Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games","authors":"S. Malliet","doi":"10.1353/book.1094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/book.1094","url":null,"abstract":"Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games David Myers Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Illustrations, notes, references, index.184 pp. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780472050925In Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games, David Myers presents a unique and inspiring perspective on game theory and game studies. A formalist, Myers tackles issues that have been sparsely addressed in theoretical frameworks-most notably the works of game theorists Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Torben Grodal, Espen Aarseth, and Brian Sutton-Smith. Myers provides a respectful yet critical assessment of these authors' insights and poses a number of questions that require further investigation. He contends a grasp of the essence of digital game play requires an enhanced formal understanding of the player-game relationship.One of the more important contributions of Play Redux resides in the establishment of a direct link between the semiotic way computer games \"generate and transform meanings through the coded manipulation of signs and symbols\" (p. 5) and the prelinguistic, psycho-physical functions of human thinking. Myers provides a convincing description of this relationship, and, more importantly, documents his argument in large detail by taking sidesteps toward educational theory, philosophy, game theory, and cognitive psychology. In doing so, he avoids making the mistake he identifies as a main cause of the receding influence of formalist theory in the second half of the twentieth century: it has not succeeded in establishing its ontological foundations.Myers has been investigating digital game semiotics for more than twentyfive years, and this gives him an advantage over many of his peers. In his earlier work, he has studied the interactive nature of digital game play on a microlevel, regarding both the structure of player cognition (in his 1984 article \"The Pattern of Player-Game Relationships\") and the transformative characteristics of in-game objects and relationships (in his 1991 article \"Time, Symbol Manipulation, and Computer Games\"). In his book The Nature of Computer Games: Play as Semiosis (2003), Myers additionally applied these insights to the semiotic analysis of a variety of game genres and titles-hereby supporting the assertion that his theory can be considered as both universal and fundamental. That he can build on his past research has enabled Myers to adopt a top-down point of view and to consider game play in terms of its essential, conceptual characteristics. …","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"4 1","pages":"388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66387731","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 Play of Psychotherapy.","authors":"T. Marks-Tarlow","doi":"10.4324/9780203766941-19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203766941-19","url":null,"abstract":"The author reviews the role of play within psychotherapy. She does not discuss the formal play therapy especially popular for young children, nor play from the Jungian perspective that encourages the use of the sand tray with adults. Instead, she focuses on the informal use of play during psychotherapy as it is orchestrated intuitively. Because play-whether we use it consciously or not-is a major source for implicit learning within the social domain, the author considers it a nonspecific factor in therapeutic effectiveness that cuts across all modalities. She also suggests that play bears an important relationship to creativity, especially as it exists in the intersubjective space between therapist and patient, i.e., the fertile zone between two subjectivities in which shared making of meaning arises. Key words: clinical intuition; hide-and-seek in therapy; imaginative play; neurobiology of play; play in psychotherapy; play's purpose in animalsTHE VERY EXISTENCE of a journal devoted exclusively to the multidisciplinary examination of play suggests that there is a paradigm shiftafoot, away from the thinking of scholars who dismissed play as aimless expenditure, toward the neurobiologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and other researchers who now embrace and endorse play for its manifest benefits. These benefits all emerge from the most basic mammalian endowment-the playful curiosity that spurs the cutting edge of development in all mammals, knits together self and society, and provides seeds for the creative spirit in human culture. Given that play is a vital instinct hard wired into the mammalian brain (Panksepp 1998), one especially important for the extended childhood of human beings, no wonder play constitutes a hidden layer of psychotherapy. Within psychotherapy of all sorts, play often operates at nonconscious, implicit levels. This occurs through the play of clinical intuition as it manifests at a moment-to-moment level. How and why we psychotherapists play with patients sets the tone for sessions and determines the feel of the intersubjective process.This article draws on the interpersonal neurobiology of attachment to illustrate how the self grows, unfolds, and builds new structure through play. Freedom to play without inhibition or constriction is a key ingredient for joy, interest, passion, and vitality later in life. Just as children reveal their growing edge during play, so too do therapists. Because play is developmentally crucial to achieving cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social flexibility and complexity, it remains a central part of the repertoire of clinical intuition.Sometimes we therapists succumb to the instinct to play in order to lighten up the atmosphere. At other times, the intuitive urge to play marks an open, nondefensive attitude towards ourselves and others. Whether initiated by therapist or patient, the instinct to play encourages the experience of fun during experimentation with new possibil","PeriodicalId":45727,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Play","volume":"4 1","pages":"352-377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70591927","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}