ABSTRACT
In the United States, there is a heated debate over whether it is acceptable to dress up for Halloween as Moana, a Polynesian Disney character. In the Netherlands, dressing up as Santa's little helper Black Peter by painting one's face black has increasingly been considered offensive. People cannot agree: Is it wrong to pretend play to be Moana or Black Peter?
This chapter poses meta-questions inspired by this problem: How do people decide if some pretend acts are normatively wrong? Is role-playing in itself a normative act? And if role-play is a normative act, where does it get its normativity from? The chapter provides examples of role-play that are seen as controversial and discusses the philosophical view that all play is “good in itself” (or “neither right nor wrong”), which is in tension with a view that role-play can be wrong. It analyses this tension from the enactive and ecological perspective by referring to the concept of affordances. It examines what follows for a normativity of play from two perspectives on affordances for play (normative and non-normative), and suggests practical ramifications that follow from taking either perspective on normativity of play.
