ABSTRACT
Children’s play continues to puzzle us despite the significant advances we have made in our effort to understand it during the last three decades. As we untangle some aspects of play, we discover its new features. As a result, we continue to expand its conceptualizations. A quick glance at different perspectives from which play has been conceptualized illustrates this. One line of earlier theory and research conceptualized play on the basis of the psychological processes involved in it such as cognition, affect, or communication. A second line conceptualized play as a psychological construct such as power (cf. Sutton-Smith, 1983, 1995), and a third line emphasized play’s performance features and named play accordingly; for example, playas-improvisation (e.g., Sawyer, 1997). Finally, a fourth line of work focused on the contributions of play to children’s development and education (e.g., Göncü & Becker, 1992; Nicolopoulou, chap. 11, this volume).
