We study play because life is crap. Life is crap, and it's full of pain and suffering, and the only thing that makes it worth living - the only thing that makes it possible to get up in the morning and go on living - is play.
Research has shown that children who play often both solitarily and socially become more creative and imaginative than those whose exposure to play and toys is limited.
Playful stimulation probably hits all kinds of synaptic possibilities. It is all make-believe and all over the map. The potentiality of the synapses and the potentiality of playfulness are a beautiful marriage.
Play is always a fantasy, but once you get into the frame, it is quite real, and everything you do is real. You put acres and acres of real movement and real action and real belief in it.
One thinks of toys and play as an area of great novelty and potentiality where all sorts of responses can be developed. The fact that adults are allowing their imaginations to have activity through toy kinds of objects is a further reflection of the belief in the imagination of the adult mind.
If you are going to take away war toys, then what are you to replace them with? Children need to feel courageous, brave, and assertive. They need to feel strong; that is the purpose of their play.
Despite the efforts of some parents, children still tend to act out the traditional sex roles of our culture. The child's peer group may have more of an influence over this than the parents.
A weakness of many of the self-oriented play theories is that they often sound too much like vain consumerism instead of being about the more passionate and willful character of human play, which involves a willingness, even if a fantasy, to believe in the play venture itself.
