ABSTRACT
The study of play, as evidenced by the chapters in this volume, is an important and active topic of research. It has occupied psychologists, biologists, and educators for much of the 20th century. Most of this research was, of course, motivated by Piaget’s (1962) work. Following his lead, child and developmental psychologists have spent much of their time studying the pretend, or fantasy, play of children, often to the exclusion of other types of play. However, researchers in other fields such as ethology (e.g., Bateson, 1981) and behavioral biology (Fagen, 1981) have also been studying play, but instead of fantasy they usually parse play in terms of locomotor, object, and social play (Pellegrini & Smith, 2005).
