Factors in Play

Psychologists and anthropologists generally agree that a wide variety of factors are at work in play. Experts on animals emphasize that the animals that play are those that must develop skill and strength for predatory activities. In tribal cultures in which speed and skill with weapons are important adult competences, the greater part of children's play is given over to such physical exercises. Australian aboriginal children spend much of their time imitating the animals that they will hunt when they are grown up. They mimic the animals and stalk each other in the guise of hunters. The most universal of all games among spear-throwing tribes is one in which two groups throw spears at a target that is rolled down between them. In nomadic cultures, where life is uncertain, adults and children play games of chance in which they discover whose decisions are favored by the gods. 

Even today, games of chance are played most often by those members of modern society who have the least control over their affairs and the least scope for personal initiative. A game of chance brings the player an opportunity that life usually does not, as the example of the modern lottery illustrates. Games of strategy, which emerged in human culture with the appearance of social classes and specialized military groups, appear to have been developed as ways of training for diplomacy and warfare. A game of strategy trains the player in strategic thinking. 

Modern-day children, with their innumerable toys, practice the manipulative control of objects—just as their parents manipulate autos, thermostats, dishwashers, and computers. Both adults and children live in a world where the control of machines is critical to survival. In general, however, children's play today focuses on mental rather than physical activity. This mental activity typically is modeled in a great variety of types of make-believe play, sociodramatic play with other children, or constructive play with toys or with arts and crafts materials. In part it is also modeled by board games and card games. 

Thus play is not the same everywhere, but changes to suit the circumstances of survival in different places and different historical times. In several kinds of play, however, there is some universality. Almost all children imitate the most exciting adults in their own culture. In American colonial times these were often outlaws or Indians. In modern times they may be spacemen or the current heroes or heroines of television dramas. At all times children seem to be striving to feel mastery in relationship to challenging, dangerous, or threatening people. As children in the modern world increasingly live in apartment complexes and no longer play on the streets, they are confined to imitating what is brought to them through television and the motion pictures.

Games with rules also seem to be universal, serving as exercises in social life through which the player learns to cooperate in larger groups. But not all cultures have competitive games. In many societies games are cooperative, or they are the parallel expression of skills with little emphasis on winning. Usually, those are cultures where collaboration is essential to survival. 

In most cultures there are clear-cut sex differences in play. Males typically play more active games in larger groups, usually with emphasis on attack and defense. Females tend to play in smaller groups, and show greatest interest in games of acceptance and rejection (Mother, may I?). These differences are apparently learned, and derive from the traditional differences in male and female occupations, in which the men must hunt and fight and the women nurture the young. But beginning in the 1970s, in the United States and some other countries as well, increasing emphasis has been placed on eliminating traditional sex differences in play.