ABSTRACT
In general, play is seen as serving anticipatory socialization purposes for the young child. It is conceptualized as a form of social behavior that results in children learning to cooperate and interact with others. In their decontextualization of games and play, contemporary theorists have failed to grasp the fundamental fact that all instances of play and games involve the interactions of one or more persons who are orienting their cognitive, physical, and symbolic behaviors toward themselves, one another, or animate and inanimate objects. Any interactional episode between one or more persons can be studied in terms of the dimensions of place that are acted on and played out. Play and games, as Caillois noted, exist along a continuum of interactional structuredness. A game shall be defined as an interactional activity of a competitive or cooperative nature involving one or more players who play by a set of rules that define the content of the game.
