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The authors compare pretend play and executive function both in preschool children with an acquired brain injury and in neurotypical preschool children. They find the ability to produce logical, sequenced pretend play actions and object substitutions in play correlates strongly with executive function ability in both groups, and working memory emerges in their study as the most reliable predictor of pretend play in both groups of children. Their investigation highlights the need to include pretend play in rehabilitating children with brain injuries and the importance of pretend play for developing executive function in all children.

The author discusses American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey and the Laboratory School he founded at the end of the nineteenth century at the University of Chicago, where he conducted important studies of child development. The author notes the influence of Dewey's theory of (and pedagogical guidelines for) children's play, which he initially formulated between 1896 and 1900 and which subsequently influenced such play theorists as Lev S. Vygotsky and Loris Malaguzzi. However, the author asserts, the literature on play has largely neglected Dewey and contains no account of his important and influential early works about play, a gap he intends this article to fill.

The authors contend that children benefit from play as a form of intervention and as a means of fostering their cognitive, social, and physical growth. They review several standardized instruments developed over the last fifty years to assess this benefit of play on child development. They identify twenty-one such play measures, the majority of them applicable to children under twelve. Some of the measurements can be conducted by children, but most are proxy rated and employ some form of observation. Over half require no or minimal training. Others can be completed in less than thirty minutes. More evaluations exist for the earlier instruments, but these measurements lacked psychometric evidence to back them up. The authors note they based their selections on the distinct characteristics and features of the measures, and they offer their conclusions to assist users in choosing the best systematic instruments for their specific needs.

The authors investigated the outdoor physical play of Norwegian first graders in after-school programs using a study that viewed play from the children's perspective. The authors identified three themes of the physically active play they observed--"playing with friends," "no one decides," and "I can do it." Their findings highlight the dynamic importance of such play, especially of child initiation in play and of playing with other children. The physical outdoor play fostered fun and playful interaction, leading both to improved communication and movement capabilities. The authors discuss their findings in relation to Scott Eberle's theoretical understanding of play, findings that indicate the complex conditions that support and extend children's play in after-school programs and the need to recognize them.

The authors examine the relationships between home play and learning--measured by reading and teaching practices at home--among low-income families, including those with mental health issues. Based on a large database from the Family Map Inventory, a screening tool for home visiting programs, the authors' findings revealed that play-related concerns such as play materials, home play, and the variety of play away from home had significant impact. They conclude that care givers who provide children with more play opportunities both at home and away from home tend to read books with children more frequently and to teach them more basic academic skills. This suggests that early play interactions can contribute to early learning and implies that intervention programs such as Early Head Start and home-visiting programs focusing on play may boost a family's resilience and add value to existing services.

Jeremy Sawyer recounts that, after Lev S. Vygotsky's death, Jean Piaget conceded the Russian psychologist correctly understood the social origins, functions, and developmental trajectory of children's egocentric speech (now called private speech) but dismissed this work as irrelevant to children's egocentrism or nondifferentiation of perspectives. Sawyer asserts that, although Piaget precluded perspective taking in egocentric speech, a post-Vygotskian framework suggests private speech and sociodramatic play may actually promote perspective taking, thereby reducing egocentrism. In light of these assertions, Sawyer examines private speech transcripts from preschoolers for evidence of perspective taking and concludes that they suggest children internalize perspectival differences through private speech and use more implicit perspective taking than explicit mental-state terms. And preschoolers, the author suggests, employ more sociodramatic speech in a sociodramatic play context to enact imaginary scenarios and pretend roles. He concludes that, rather than a remnant of egocentrism, private speech may be a psychologicaltool for engaging multiple perspectives.

The author contends that, although most early childhood educators agree about the value of play for child development, preschools and kindergartens often do not reflect this belief, and she discusses this anomaly in the adult notion of play and how it manifests in classroom practices. She argues that it produces schoolroom practices in which adults use play merely as an instrument of teaching that are actually incompatible with play. Indeed, so-called "play-based instruction" misrepresents the true nature of play--the only activity through which young children fully express their own agency and in which they can truly participate in their own development. She discusses the teacher-initiated and teacher-driven pseudo or fake play that forces children to take on roles and enact pretend scenarios in ways pleasing to adults. And she seeks a remedy in the Vygotsky-Elkonin theory of play, which allows us to distinguish real play from fake play and helps restore the rightful place of true play to early childhood classrooms.

The author draws on Lev S. Vygotsky's conception of play and Gunilla Lindqvist's methodology concerning the aesthetics of play to discuss play practice in early childhood classrooms. Based on the study of an educational experiment at a primary school, she discusses how children in a school setting simultaneously engage in developed forms of imagining employing concepts in the shared intellectual space afforded by a Conceptual PlayWorld. She argues that, by showcasing for policy makers the advantages of this cultural-historical program, teachers can support play as a leading source for the development of imagination and learning for young children in preschool, kindergarten, and early classrooms.

The author argues that play always occurs within a social context and in relation to the various cultures that coexist within the classroom and the school setting. She uses Vygotsky's definition of play as dramatic or make-believe play for preschool children, and she applies Vygotskian and post-Vygotskian theories, including Daniil Elkonin's categories of play, to examine mature and immature play among preschool children. She describes case studies of dual-language learners (DLLs) and English-only (EO) preschoolers (who need more time and scaffolding to acquire mature, make-believe play) along with those of reluctant players. She also promotes Bodrova and Leong's observation and assessment measure, PRoPELS, for teachers and researchers seeking to help children reach a mature level of play in early childhood classrooms. She concludes with suggestions for supporting such mature play.

The author explores the relationship of play to choreography. He defines choreography as the rules that guide body movements from their minute physicality to their broad social and cultural contours. He conducts a review of the literature and accentuates five general topics--learning through creativity; choreography as writing and pedagogy; comparisons of dance and choreography to play and sport; children's play and environments as choreographies; and choreography as critical play interventions in public spaces. He argues that viewing play through a choreographic lens helps us understand how players physically communicate and create meaning through action in various play situations.

The authors examined technological and traditional infant toys to understand the U.S. toy market facing today's care givers. They found significant differences in the two types of toys in terms of their developmental targets--with more traditional toys aimed at physical development and more technological toys aimed at cognitive development. Given that the toy market is so vast and that technological toys sometimes come with considerable costs, they argue for the need to understand more precisely how toys are marketed to prevent exploitation based on the pursuit of a so-called "brainy baby."

People, the author holds, instinctively believe quitting a game to be a simple choice: you are either playing or you are not. But she finds quitting play more complex. To understand better the whole ecosystem of play, she maps out the reasons Finnish players abandon or reduce their gaming and examines these reasons through the lens of specific demands. Using an online survey and interviews, she reveals that the dedication and effort needed to play--and the expected audience for a game--can drive players away from the games they once so enjoyed. She concludes that using the player service model promoted by Jaako Stenros and Olli Sotamaa in 2009 can identify the actions game designers might take to lessen the effect of these game demands.

The authors explore children's symbolic play that involves themes of fear and darkness, and they investigate the nature of children's binary oppositions, particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-long qualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years of age. They observed the children engage with play materials, including toys and dolls, at home and on virtual sites such as "Roblox." The play episodes they analyze highlight children's dyadic roles and scenarios and the pleasure of their play involving themes of fear. The authors also address the media and cultural representations that provide roles and narratives for the children to extend this dark play.

In this article, the author deploys Erving Goffman's concept of territories of the self as an analytical tool to understand the challenges and opportunities a childcare setting presents for children engaged in social fantasy play. He uses this concept to unpack the unique institutional play habitat of a childcare facility and shows how Goffman's territories form a constant concern for children in their engagements, orientations, and creative projects in social fantasy play. Through an in-depth analysis of emblematic play in an ethnographically inspired observational study, the author illustrates how the need for play domains and social alliances in childcare helps create both the demanding obstacles and inspirational possibilities of children's social fantasy play.

The author discusses the process of play in terms of six elements in the play cycle first introduced by Sturrock and Else in 1998 and revised by King and Newstead in 2020--precue, play cue, play return, play frame, flow, and annihilation--and their relation to Winnicott's concepts of "potential space" or the "third area," which Sturrock referred to as the "ludic third." Claiming that, although four of the six elements can be observed in actual play, two--flow and precue--cannot, the author focuses on the importance of flow in established play cycles enabling the sharing of children's inner and outer worlds with other children and adults during their play. He also considers the implications of such play cycle flow in both therapeutic and learning contexts.

The author examines guided play among students in a South African classroom using a play-and-write workshop constructed by her and her students. She determines that the workshop displays the characteristics of playful learning, lies on the playful learning spectrum, and fits the criteria for guided play. She concludes that, given the benefits of playful learning and guided play in particular, teaching involving construction with the students and allowing student-directed activity can prove valuable and should be put to service where possible beyond kindergarten. She adds that these methods should be employed in conjunction with other educational goals in South Africa and elsewhere in the developing world to help mitigate such problems as underfunding and large class sizes.

The authors investigate the personality traits of parents and children and their significant influence on the behavior of the other. Using the HEXACO model of personality, the authors examine the behavior of one hundred parent-child dyads on a playground to understand broader parent-child relationships. Their analyses reveal two opposed types of parental behavior (engaged parents versus unengaged parents) and child behavior (introverted cautious play versus autonomous energetic play) on the playground. The authors assert their study demonstrates that the personality traits of both parents and children as measured by the HEXACO model play a significant role in parental and child behaviors during play and in broader interactions.

The authors consider play to be critical and intrinsic to healthy human life and development, and they argue that children's right to play should be supported by the environment in which they live. Their study seeks to understand what children do when they appear not to play during free play periods at early childhood education and care institutions. Their analysis of nonplay activities produced five categories: conversations, practical tasks, passive observation, wandering, and conflicts (or crying). These categories, they believe, can help kindergarten teachers become aware of factors in the physical environment that prevent children from playing and detect children who fall outside the play community.

The author follows a new materialist approach to consider the informal and collaborative creative gathering called jamming as creative play, and she makes a case for the jam as a transformative event of genuine intrasubjective dialogue. She uses Karen Barad's theory of agential realism and Hans-Georg Gadamer's ethics of play to argue for the jam as an ethico-socio-political event that supports the communal and creation-centered aspects of our collective existence and offers an opportunity for learning responsibility (or "response-ability," as Karen Barad calls it) and accountability. She concludes that jamming, like creative play, offers the kind of cooperative underpinnings essential to our relational and ontological makeup.

The authors surveyed public libraries to learn about the opportunities for play they offered and children's freedom to engage in such play without adult supervision. The authors conclude that, in recent years, public libraries in the United States have increasingly created spaces and programs enabling free play for children and teens. These include "maker spaces" (for constructive play), playrooms with toys and games for young children, and rooms where teens can socialize and play games. The authors describe the survey results and three especially successful library play programs in detail. These results, they conclude, illustrate how librarians have welcomed children and enabled free play in the library through policies of nonintervention and by emphasizing nonintervention by care givers who might otherwise intervene in such play.

The author seeks to expand the notion of the "play cycle," first introduced in 1998, to include the "functional cycle," with its "perceptual cue," touted by Jakob von Uexküll. He also discusses Simon Nicholson's theory of "loose parts" and James J. Gibson's notion of "affordances." He outlines the impact of these and his now-revised play cycle and its perceptual cues on professional playwork and other play-related activities, especially those in preschool, child care, and the early years of education.

In what the author calls an autoethnography, he examines two aspects of his love of a favorite childhood toy: G.I. Joe. First, because the author is a contingent pacificist and this military figure--a fundamentally violent toy--played so important a role in his life, he now seeks to reconcile his aversion to (real life) violence with his enjoyment of G.I. Joe. Second, he explores how his experience as a Third Culture Kid (TCK)--born in the United States, but growing up in Africa--was affected by his enjoyment of G.I. Joe. He combines research, reflection, analysis, and narrative in an account of how his experiences with G.I. Joe may have been manifested in his creativity and how they provided a therapeutic catharsis following his exposure to actual violent conflict. Hopkins also argues for the future use of autoethnography in play studies.

The author argues that ethnography is a kindred of play. Based on her research of play in digital gaming environments, she draws several parallels between the practices of ethnography and the practices of play. She explores the complexities of play in games and expands our understanding of the work of ethnography as play.

The authors conduct a broad, cross-cultural review of the literature in fields such as psychology, education, speech-language pathology, early intervention, and library science concerned with board games and learning in young children. They include experimenter-developed and commercial board games and children's learning in mathematics, science, and language, as well as social, emotional, and cultural understanding. The authors discuss findings related to teaching and the classroom, speech-language therapy, intervention programs, and home and community settings such as libraries. Pointing to the nascent nature of the research in many areas, they highlight how board games, especially those featuring cooperative play, can foster multidomain learning and offer promising avenues for future research.

The author describes how, during the COVID-19 pandemic, clinicians embraced telehealth for vulnerable children struggling with intense feelings, learning challenges, and isolation. She suggests that generating playful engagement, however difficult without the toys and comforts of the traditional office, remains crucial. She discusses the stresses of the telehealth experience and the importance of identifying and mobilizing a child's initiative and agency in this setting. She asserts that, when clinicians maintain empathy and share how they imagine children's experiences, a joining can occur that lessens the children's sense of isolation and emotional hurdles. She then concludes that, if a clinician's imaginative self becomes engaged with that of a child, spontaneity and forward movement are possible even when employing the medium of telehealth.

The author examines the childhood experiences of formerly enslaved children. He suggests that the conventional understandings of scholars and historians concerning play may not be applicable to the complex lives of enslaved children because researchers do not consider such children as always propertied beings. Their play practices were molded by their proximity to violence and by their being owned as property. Rethinking what constitutes play for enslaved children, Harris asserts, unlocks newer possibilities for understanding the behaviors, actions, and desires of these children. Their play practices allowed them to learn about--and challenge--their place in the world. Building on and challenging seminal scholarship, Harris encourages readers to rethink what constitutes play and to view ordinary forms of play as intentional attacks against the institution of slavery and white supremacy.

The author discusses the impact of Black Twitter, a section of Twitter dominated by members of the African diaspora, on marginalized communities when it offers alternatives to the rules and expectations of mainstream social media, especially in relation to such online games as UNO. She touts the value of what she calls the "petty" for Black players turned unofficial designers and their creative and important resistance to--and even a defiance of--such official rules.

Drawing on such academic topics as the white racial frame, critical race theory, Black critical theory, and Black male studies, the authors offer Black PlayCrit, a tool focusing on the specificity of Blackness and anti-Black violence in play. Calling for the adoption of Black PlayCrit in future studies, they suggest researchers should consider practicing its tenets by developing questions that privilege the stories of Black male youths and consider racism a part of their everyday lived experience, including their participation in structured and unstructured play. Protecting young Black males, they argue, requires a shift in the way we view them and how they play in schools and communities. Doing so may make students of play uncomfortable, may push the boundaries of the scholarly understanding of play, and may force the scholarship around play to face harsh realities about the structure of communities and recreational agencies. However, such thoughtful consideration can help create a society in which playing while Black no longer becomes a death sentence.

Traditionally, Black communities have used humor to talk back to those in power while avoiding what the author calls "the dominant gaze." She argues that Black humor acts as a resistance, especially when considered through the lens of play. Drawing from cultural play literature, critical race studies, and the literature about Black humor, she considers two related case studies based on the hashtags #PermitPatty and #Karen to explore the response of Black people to white femininity. The first case concerns the circulation of the phrase "Permit Patty" in response to a white woman who called the police against a young Black girl for selling water on the sidewalk. The second details the use of the name "Karen" online, highlighting how white women align themselves with police to oppress African Americans. The author concludes that Black online users deploy elements of humor, such as the omniscient narrator and inverse stereotyping, to call attention to this reliance of white womanhood on the police state, often at the expense of Black and Brown people, and children in particular.

Drawing connections between anti-Black racism, surveillance, and the criminalization of Black bodies, and using an autoethnographic approach, the author discusses the effect of racism on Black play. She analyzes her personal encounters and the public accounts of others to illustrate how white supremacy uses scrutiny and its attendant actions by citizens and law enforcement to deny Black people the basic freedom of play.

T. L.Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and cofounder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades, and her research explores the relations between culture and technology in online leisure environments. Her "Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming" (2018), which chronicled the emerging media space of online game broadcasting, won the 2019 American Sociological Association's Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology book award. She is also the author of "Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming" (2012) and "Play between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture" (2006), and coauthor of "Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method" (2012).

In an article adapted from his latest work, "Play: A Basic Pathway to the Self,"published by The Strong in 2020, the author offers a wide-ranging review of play studies--and the thinkers, philosophers, and scholars who led to the creation of the discipline. He also reviews and seeks to explain for both specialists and more general readers the great diversity of play itself, which he ultimately considers a "pathway of experience" that resembles other such pathways as ritual, work, and what he calls "communitas"

The author reviews the research and scholarly literature about young children's play with tablet computers and identifies four major topics relevant to the subject--digital literacy, learning, transgressive and creative play, and parental involvement. He finds that young children's tablet computer play relies not only on technology, but also on sociocultural conditions. He argues that research should pay greater attention to transgressive play and should in general treat play as an autotelic concept because the nuances of play are as important as its function. He calls attention to the lack of affordances for creativity in apps for young children, explores the need for parental involvement in young children's tablet computer play, and discusses the importance of agency and access in such play.

The authors discuss assortative mating, the tendency--important for increased genetic variation--of individuals to mate with the phenotypically similar at rates greater than chance. Influenced by many factors--physical characteristics like height and weight and demographic elements like behavior and attitudes, economic status and education, church attendance and ethnic identity, politics and personality--assortative mating has been considered with regard to having a good sense of humor but never to being playful or being fun loving. Based on a study of 254 undergraduates, the authors examine how these variables correlate with the search for desirable mates by adults and suggest the variables are indeed subject to assortative mating.

Drawing on evolutionary theory, the author questions which cognitive processes underlie the capacities to play and to pretend play and the degree to which they are present in both humans and nonhuman animals. Considering cognitive capacities not all-or-nothing phenomena, she argues they are present in varying degrees in a wide range of species. Recognizing the risks involved in comparative studies, she identifies the unique features of cognition underlying pretend play while describing the broader phylogenetic sources from which they come. In the end, she finds, although play based on particular degrees of memory, perception, and consciousness can be found in many species, pretend play depends on distinctive degrees of memory, imagination, and metacognition--a cognitive process she calls "reflective imagination"--and appears characteristically human.

Policy makers around the world increasingly mandate play-based learning in kindergarten classrooms, a pedagogical approach backed by research espousing not only the developmental appropriateness of play-based learning for this age group but also the benefits to students' academic achievement. Despite these mandates, researchers continue to see a discrepancy between policy and practice. Using the lens of institutional theory, the authors reviewed the issue and discovered that, although free play seems ubiquitous, teacher involvement in play--often fundamental for academic learning--fails to occur in approximately half of the classrooms studied. The researchers found evidence of an entrenched and limited definition of play as being child directed, a definition perpetuated by media depictions. These findings have direct implications for teaching practice, suggesting a need to develop a broader understanding of play-based learning and its role in classrooms for media outlets and the stakeholders they influence.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is the past president of the International Society for Infant Studies, served as the Associate Editor of "Child Development" and is on the governing counsel of the Society for Research in Child Development. In 2021 she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Education. She is on the advisory board for Nickelodeon, Vroom, the Boston Children's Museum, Disney Junior, and Jumpstart. Her research examines the development of early language and literacy as well as the role of play in learning. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff is the Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair and professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. She also holds joint appointments in the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Linguistics and Cognitive Science. She founded and is the director of the Child's Play, Learning, and Development Lab at the University of Delaware. Golinkoff is the Treasurer of the International Congress on Infant Studies and was an Associate Editor of "Child Development." She consults for numerous organizations (e.g., Jumpstart, the Delaware Children's Museums, and CHOICES for deaf children) and federal agencies. Her research focuses on language development, the benefits of play, and preschoolers' early spatial knowledge. In 2021 she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Education. As long-time collaborators, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff have authored fourteen books, including "How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years," "Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn--and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less," and "Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us about Raising Successful Children."

During the first and second months after school lockdown in spring 2020, the author and others conducted surveys in the United States of children aged eight through thirteen and of parents with children the same ages. Contrary to many expectations, they found the children less anxious than they had been prior to the pandemic. The children were getting more sleep, were much more likely to report themselves as happy than sad, were using their free time to discover and engage in new, self-chosen activities, were helping out at home, were enjoying the extra time with their family, and were gaining new respect and appreciation from their parents. The author concludes that these findings, along with findings from other studies early in the pandemic, suggest an increased time for play, an increased opportunity to contribute constructively to family life, and an increased family togetherness improved the mental well-being of many children during at least the first months of the pandemic. He discusses these results in relation to Self-Determination Theory, which posits that psychological well-being depends upon satisfaction of basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, all of which may have been satisfied to a greater extent after lockdown than before.

Christopher Bensch is vice president for collections and chief curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. He oversees the acquisition of and care for the world's most comprehensive collection of playthings. He also serves as the primary spokesperson for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Andrew Borman is digital games curator at The Strong. He collects digital games and coordinates the museum's digital game preservation efforts. Michelle Parnett-Dwyer is curator at The Strong. She collects and interprets a comprehensive collection of toys and dolls. Nic Ricketts is curator at The Strong. He acquires and interprets the museum's collection of board games, puzzles, and other nonelectronic games, as well as photographs, art, and paper ephemera. In this interview, The Strong's curators discuss the impact of the pandemic on play and the museum's collecting and preservation efforts.

The authors use the location-based, augmented-reality game "Wayfinder Live," which one of them designed, as a case study to analyze urban play. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining urban play, they expand existing approaches to the topic by drawing on current theories about interfaces, assemblages, and coding in such fields as media and cultural studies, game and play studies, and urban studies. They consider "Wayfinder Live" as an interface--a site of both connection and translation--for urban play, one that encourages its players to test a given city's physical and social boundaries. They argue that the game offers a fruitful, if always contingent and contextual, framework for analyzing digitally mediated urban play.

The popularity of "Pokémon GO" has been credited to its branding by the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company Nintendo, the technological innovations of the game's developer Niantic, and the historical traditions of European avant-garde locative play. The author, instead, offers a different explanation that involves a radical new take on "Poke´mon GO," pointing to its ancestry in the seasonal play of Japan. Based on his fieldwork during residencies at Studio Kura in Itoshima, Japan, and through Asialink at Tokyo Art and Space, he explores the Japanese roots of the game in insect collecting, shrine pilgrimage, leisure tourism, and stamp rallies as modes of play. He relocates the genealogy of "Poke´mon GO" and invokes the largely untold history of Japanese seasonal play, both of which hold significant implications for the ways we consider and conceptualize pervasive and location-based games globally.

In 2009, Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern published "Pervasive Games: Theory and Design," based on research conducted during the Integrated Project on Pervasive Games (IPerG) and funded by the European Union (E.U.) from 2005 to 2008. They wrote it--the first book-length treatise on the topic--before the widespread use of smartphones and the ubiquitous impact of gaming on mobile devices. The work documented an era that a number of scholars came to identify as the first wave (or generation) of pervasive games. In 2019 a full decade after the book's publication, the authors were invited to participate in a roundtable discussion as part of the Urban Play Spring Seminar event in Tampere, Finland, to reflect on the evolution of pervasive games and on the recent scholarship about them. Many of the claims "Pervasive Games" made, especially in relation to the design space of these kinds of games, have endured--even when such games are considered in technological and medium-specific frameworks. However, the book also featured claims and characterizations that to the authors themselves appear, in hindsight, optimistic, irrelevant, or simply inaccurate. The emerging genres of pervasive games the authors observed charted paths that later games simply did not follow, and their bold claim that commercially viable pervasive games would not compete with other games, but instead with pastimes, proved inaccurate. Even the delimitation they gave the phenomenon itself remains in flux a decade later--both the umbrella term they used for it and the types of games they included as part of it are still being negotiated. The following is a recorded and transcribed version of the roundtable discussion (including questions from the moderator Dale Leorke and the attending audience) edited for publication. It examines the validity of the term "pervasive games" in an era when games and playfulness have seemingly become ubiquitous, looks at the commercial potential of pervasive play and games, and investigates how these games can meaningfully be connected with the spaces of the cities, towns, and other environments where they are performed.

The author discusses Johan Huizinga's "Homo Ludens" and the animating mood that it calls the "play spirit." He argues that these styles of playfulness represent a major practical and theoretical contribution Huizinga offers contemporary studies of play, and he considers Huizinga's methodology in a reading that runs counter to formal definitions of play. Drawing on phenomenological, linguistic, and hermeneutic elements in the text, he presents an alternative understanding of play's form and what resists formalization. By attending to Huizinga's hesitations and rhetorical excess in key moments of explanation, the article unvails the development of play spirit in "Homo Ludens" and its significance for the study of play and games.

Game design offers a unique but often misunderstood pedagogical opportunity. The author draws on learning theory, feminist epistemology, and game studies to analyze a novel genre of games capable of realizing this opportunity by mobilizing knowledge through play--praxis games--founded on the concept of situated praxis. Situated praxis encourages the design and development of games that guide players to discover knowledge inside a range of communities, domains, and experiences. To demonstrate the applicability of such design, the author discusses his experience with games related to healthcare.

Language play is a key component of many children's popular graphic novels. The authors analyze the sound and word play in Dav Pilkey's illustrated Captain Underpants series. They argue that Pilkey's literary devices fall into two main areas of hyperbole and linguistic creativity and that Pilkey's language shifts the reader into a carnivalesque play frame. In Pilkey's work, the use of language contributes to a humorous disconnect between a real word and its distorted counterpart and between real worlds and a parallel sphere of hyperbolic pretend play

The authors consider mature make-believe play a critical component of childhood that helps children develop new skills and learn to communicate. They argue that, although theoretical accounts of play have emphasized the importance of make-believe play for children to achieve social and academic competence, the absence of a reliable and valid measure of children's mature make-believe play has hampered the evaluation of such claims. They seek to address this shortcoming with a review of the psychometric characteristics of existing assessments and with their findings from a new assessment using the Mature Play Observation Tool (MPOT), which they administered during a multiyear longitudinal study of twenty-six early-childhood classrooms. They found that children in classrooms scoring well on the MPOT better perform such skills as self-regulation, literacy, and numeracy.

Although most early-childhood educators agree on the value of play in child development, they find it increasingly harder to advocate for play given today's pressure for academic achievement. Using the theoretical work of Lev Vygotsky, the authors discuss how make-believe play among children helps them develop skills critical for success in school and beyond. They discuss the strategies of the Tools of the Mind curriculum that scaffold mature make-believe play, and they demonstrate how "Sesame Street" and "Esme and Roy," shows from Sesame Workshop, help parents and teachers use these strategies with children.

Research has shown that playful learning helps foster the development of young children. Adult guidance of this play in meaningful ways can unlock the transformative power of education. Lack of knowledge about guided play, however, often leads to children growing up without opportunities to learn through play. Considering this, the authors analyze findings from the pilot phases of Play Every Day, an intervention based in urban communities in India, Mexico, and South Africa. This program is designed to shift the perceptions of care givers about play and its relationship to child development and to allow them to guide children in learning through play. The authors describe the program's intent to contribute to global knowledge of best practices for promoting playful learning. They discuss developing a global framework and contextualizing its delivery to empower care givers as ambassadors of learning through play in young children's lives.

Rosemarie T. Truglio is the senior vice president of curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop, where she is responsible for the development of the interdisciplinary curriculum on which "Sesame Street" is based, and oversees content development across platforms such as television, publishing, toys, home video, and theme park activities. She also oversees the curriculum development for all new show production, including "Esme and Roy," a series about learning through play, airing on HBO and PBS, and two shows on Apple TV's "Ghostwriter," a reimagined version of a workshop series with a literature focus from the 1990s and "Helpsters," whose characters love to solve problems using fundamental coding skills. Before joining Sesame Workshop in 1997, Truglio was an Assistant Professor of Communication and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition to numerous articles in child and developmental psychology journals, she is the author of "Ready for School! A Parent's Guide to Playful Learning for Children Ages 2 to 5" (2019) and coeditor of "G is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and 'Sesame Street'" (2001). She currently serves on the advisory boards of the "Child Trends News Service"; Read Alliance; The Ultimate Block Party; and The Toy Association Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She previously served on the National Advisory Child Health and Human Development Council (NICHD), the LEGO Foundation Research and Innovation Network, and the PBS KIDS Next Generation Media, among others. She received distinguished alumni awards from Douglass College (2005), University of Kansas (2013), Rutgers University (2014), and the University of Kansas Women's Hall of Fame (2015).

The authors discuss the impact of interactive digital games on the lives and the play of young children in terms of "Sesame Street"'s express mission to help children become smarter, stronger, and kinder. They conclude that such games have much the same effect as other types of play and call for more research to help use it.