Product Description: Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological underpinnings of played-through experiences and how they affect the player/performers who engage in them...read more

Product Description: The Handbook of the Study of Play brings together in two volumes thinkers whose diverse interests at the leading edge of scholarship and practice define the current field. Because play is an activity that humans have shared across time, place, and culture and in their personal developmental timelines—and because this behavior stretches deep into the evolutionary past—no single discipline can lay claim to exclusive rights to study the subject...read more

Product Description: What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of “gamification.”What if our whole life were turned into a game? What sounds like the premise of a science fiction novel is today becoming reality as “gamification...read more

Rethinking Children's Play examines attitudes towards, and experiences of, children's play. Fraser Brown and Michael Patte draw on a wide range of thought, research and practice from different fields and countries to debate, challenge and re-appraise long held beliefs, attitudes and ways of working and living with children in the play environment.Children need to play and the benefits of play are many and varied, but they are too often underestimated by parents, educators, politicians and society in general. The authors apply a playwork perspective to a wide range of settings populated by children, both formal and informal, to explore the idea that children's learning and development derives substantially from their opportunities to engage with a rich play environment that is supportive of the play process.Thoughts are provoked through examples of research, reflections on research, activities, key points and guidance on further reading.Rethinking Children's Play is essential for all those studying childhood at undergraduate and graduate level and of great interest to those working with children in any field.

Product Description: Some educational researchers claim that videogames can energize learning in both traditional and non-traditional contexts; cultivate skills more useful to a changing economy; and present information in ways more appealing to students...read more

Product Description: More than any other textbook on the market, Play and Child Development, Fourth Edition, ties play directly to child development. The authors address the full spectrum of play-related topics and seamlessly blend research, theory, and practical applications throughout this developmentally-based resource...read more

Product Description: More than any other textbook on the market, Play and Child Development, Fourth Edition, ties play directly to child development. The authors address the full spectrum of play-related topics and seamlessly blend research, theory, and practical applications throughout this developmentally-based resource...read more

While the psychodynamic understanding of play and play's therapeutic potential was long restricted to the realm of children, Winnicott's work demonstrated the profound significance of the capacity to play for healthy mental functioning during adult life. Scattered writings of Erikson, Glenn, and Shopper notwithstanding, the early spark of understanding remained largely ill developed. In Play and Playfulness, the reader is offered an exciting and highly informative set of essays about the psychic area that lies between reality and unreality and between veracity and imagination. It is the area of paradox and creativity. It sustains the self, allows for ego-replenishing regressions, and adds to the joy of the vital and lived experience. This book provides an easy and readable passage to the valley of the transitional experience in which creative synthesis of reality and unreality leads to a world of vigor, enthusiasm, and liveliness. The cultural variations and the clinical implications of such an experience are thoroughly elucidated. The result is a volume replete with technical virtuosity, clinical relevance, and the basic and nearly self evident humane music of the day-to-day experience of life.

Product Description: When players play, there is a transactional process at work, whether for children on a teeter-totter or pandas playing with peers. In this edited volume, nine experts on play show how play transactions are an important dynamic of play across cultures, age groups, even species...read more

Product Description: Erich Fromm is probably best remembered as the author of the bestselling The Art of Loving and To Have or to Be, but he also wrote extensively on social psychology, social theory, and religion and was the founder of what he called "democratic decentralizing socialism...read more