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sutton-smith’s Five easy PieCes

jAy meChlinG

Brian Sutton-Smith was a sprite. I searched my vocabulary far and wide and settled 
on this word, this reference to lively, mythological creatures among the fairies and 
elves. I never met anyone like him.

There is a long line of anthropologists and folklorists who have studied 
children’s games and folklore, stretching back into the nineteenth century 
(Bronner 1988; Bronner 2011:196–247; McNeil 1988). Brian belongs in that 
scholarly history, of course, but he was also the sort of charismatic leader a 
scholarly field, especially an interdisciplinary one, needs to thrive. Brian was 
a founding father of the children’s folklore section of the American Folklore 
Society (Sutton-Smith 2008:96) in 1978, and by the time I joined The Association 
for the Anthropological Study of Play (then TAASP, now just TASP, dropping the 
narrower disciplinary designation) in 1978, I could see in both organizations how 
his energy and personality and intelligence was at the center of both groups. He 
was the force behind the children’s folklore section’s collaborating on a first-ever 
“sourcebook” for the study of children’s folklore (Sutton-Smith, Mechling, Johnson, 
and McMahon 1995). 

I first met Brian at the meeting of TAASP at the University of Notre Dame 
(Indiana) in 1978. I came from an interdisciplinary home of American Studies, 
where I had all my degrees and my academic employment, and on the 
recommendation of an American Studies friend, Bernard “Barney” Mergen, I 
decided to try a TAASP meeting and present my first paper based on my fresh 
fieldwork with a troop of Boy Scouts. Thanks to folklorist Henry Glassie, who was 
a fellow with me at the Yale National Humanities Institute in 1975-76, I had moved 
my Boy Scout research from historical, documentary evidence to observational, 
ethnographic evidence in the field—in this case, the summer encampment of a 
California Boy Scout troop high in the Sierra Nevada. By the time of the TAASP 
call for papers and then meeting, I was ready to present my first paper based on 
that work (Mechling 1980).

At that TAASP meeting, I saw first-hand Brian’s genuine love of and enthusiasm 
for the study of play, especially the play of children and adolescents. I am 
certain that my great affection for TAASP and for Brian was that first encounter, 
where he treated me like a colleague whose work was intensely interesting to 
him. There were no academic hierarchies or accompanying snobbism at those 
TAASP meetings, in part because everyone there was studying something thought 
“trivial” by disciplinary colleagues back home (see Brian’s “triviality barrier” 
essay, discussed below) and partly because the gathering was so interdisciplinary. 
Someone there could be a famous giant in his or her home discipline but at TAASP 
people were unlikely to know that. You were just Brian or Barney or Garry or Jay.

I think the best way to honor the memory of Brian Sutton-Smith and his work 
is to give people unfamiliar with his work an easy way to access his thinking on 
the play of children and adolescents. I have selected five key essays which, if 

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you read nothing else by Brian, would give you a good enough grasp of what he 
had to say to us and why he is so important to the study of the folk cultures of 
children and adolescents. Some familiar with Brian’s massive work might choose 
a different five; these are mine, essays I return to for ideas and a reminder of why 
we (I) pursue the study of children’s cultures. And, seriously, I see something new 
in these essays each time I reread them. What more could you ask of an essay?

I do not offer here summaries of each essay. Instead, I provide something 
of a reader’s guide that signals what I find to be important in the essay. I also 
show the connections between the essays. I refer often to my own work to testify 
to the fount of ideas I draw upon in each of these five essays. I take them in 
chronological order.

One final note. I have struggled with what to call Brian in this article—Sutton-
Smith or S-S for short or simply “Brian.” I have chosen “Brian,” which is probably 
too informal for an article somewhere between a personal reminiscence and a 
scholarly discussion of his ideas, but “Brian” seems right to me.

I. 

Brian Sutton-Smith. 1959. “A Formal Analysis of Game Meaning.”  
Western Folklore 18:13–24.

Brian began his study of children’s folklore with his dissertation, eventually 
published as A History of Children’s Play: New Zealand, 1840-1950 (1982). He had 
already published The Folkgames of Children in 1973. The 1959 “Formal Analysis” 
article reflects Brian’s dissertation work and his attempt to take a scientific 
approach (as a developmental psychologist) to the study of children’s games. 
Anthropologists and others had been collecting children’s games since the late 
nineteenth century, but Brian wanted to establish a more systematic, scientific, 
reproducible approach to describing and analyzing meanings of games. In part he 
wanted to elevate the legitimacy of the study of children’s games and children’s 
folklore in general (see the “Triviality Barrier” article, below), but he also realized 
that the scientific approach would require the comparative study of games across 
cultures to see the ways cultures shape children’s games and play.

To accomplish his goals and bring other scholars into the circle of those 
studying children’s games, Brian’s strategy in the “Formal Analysis” article is to 
describe, categorize, and analyze a single game called “Bar the Door” in New 
Zealand, but going by many names in the United States (perhaps “Red Rover” 
is the most familiar to American children). Brian describes the game briefly and 
then proceeds to analyze its play, proposing a system of “ludic analysis” based 
on five major game features: (1) the game challenge, (2) player participation, (3) 
player performance, (4) the spatial scene, and (5) the temporal structure. I will not 
reproduce his analysis here, but I do want to point to a few important points he 
introduces in his analysis.

First, Brian’s analysis of this “central person game” (where one player has 
the power over many others, a central feature of “chase and capture” games 
like tag) shows his interest in the ways children’s games reflect their lives in 

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formal and informal institutions, in this case their lives in families and schools, 
where children have little power in relation to the “central persons” (parents 
and teachers) in charge of those institutions. The reader might think that Brian’s 
point is that games are “anticipatory socialization” for their adult roles, and there 
is some of that here, but Brian goes beyond what he would consider a narrowly 
reductionist, sociobiological understanding of the functions of play. Brian always 
attributed more agency to children than do most adults, including many scholars 
who study children’s lives. No, Brian’s linking the “game challenge” in central 
person games like “Bar the Door” to their lives in institutions is in the service of 
understanding how children experience the game. Even when describing and 
analyzing the formal structures of a game and the meanings of that structure, Brian 
never considers the analysis complete (or even adequate) without some effort to 
understand the experience of the game.

The second thing to notice in this article is Brian’s attention (this early, 1959) 
to the effects of the mass media on children’s games and folklore. He notes that 
the earlier animal symbolism and fabulous characters in the play of their games 
has been replaced (in the postwar era of television) with “modern symbolisms of 
the mass media” (p. 19). He later picks up this appropriation of mass media by 
children in his 1981 book, The Folkstories of Children, and in his commentary on 
ethnographic observations by his students in preschool and elementary school 
play settings (e.g., see the “Playfighting” article, below).

Third, Brian is ever-attentive to the similarities and differences between the 
sexes in children’s play and folklore. I discuss his unique book chapter, “The Play 
of Girls,” below, but in this 1959 article he observes that the increasing mixing of 
boy and girls on the playground has meant that girls are as likely as boys to play 
games like “Bar the Door” and that the girls sometimes invent “feminine variants” 
of the game (p. 19).

Fourth, Brian’s portrait of both boys and girls at play far from romanticizes 
children; in fact, he understands fully that children’s play is sometimes violent, 
mean, aggressive, obscene, and profane. Chasing and capture (tagging) games 
provide children with the perfect frame (Bateson 1972) for expressing aggression, 
sometimes real aggression but more often stylized aggression (p. 20). The folklore 
of male friendship groups depends on stylized aggression as the alternative to 
real aggression, and one of the paradoxes in this stylized aggression in games and 
play in boys’ folk groups (e.g., rough-and-tumble playfighting) is that the stylized 
aggression is a signal of closeness and trust. Similarly, Brian sees value in the 
stylized fear in the chasing and capture games. “In the game,” he writes, “fear may 
be experienced and yet it is not limitless. It exists within a controlled setting. The 
players control the fear, the fear does not control the players” (p. 20). In fact, the 
play frame of the chase and capture game provides a safe place and time for the 
child to experiment with power and control; the central person game, for example, 
temporarily gives power to even the less skilled player (p. 21).

In the 1960s Brian collaborated with anthropologist John Roberts on the cross-
cultural study of games, a collaboration Garry Chick discusses in this special 
issue. Using ethnographic evidence and at times the Human Relations Area File, 
Brian and Roberts formulated and tested with the available data hypotheses about 

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the ways games (e.g., games of chance, of skill, of strategy, and combinations 
of these) reflect the cultures represented in the ethnographies (e.g., Roberts and 
Sutton-Smith 1962). The connection is not simply anticipatory socialization, letting 
youth play at games that provide skills for their lives as adults in institutions, 
though there is some of that in the games. The relationship is more complicated. 
My own example from my work with a Boy Scout troop at their camp uses the 
Roberts and Sutton-Smith categories and thesis to understand some of the games 
the troop played, in particular their “Treasure Hunt” game and ensuing “Nugget 
Auction” at the evening campfire. In my analysis (Mechling 2001:254–57) I 
observed that, although the main message of the Boy Scout camp activities is the 
notion that hard work (skill plus strategy) yields success, a message in keeping 
with the ethos of capitalism, the game of Treasure Hunt and the Nugget Auction 
actually undermined that message by having luck play such a large role in both 
games. So although the games look like anticipatory socialization preparing the 
boys for a life in a capitalistic society, the games revealed (and disguised, the 
value of folklore) an ugly truth about capitalism. It is in folklore, like games, that 
young people can be schooled in the cultural contradictions of capitalism.

II.

Brian Sutton-Smith. 1970. “The Psychology of Childlore: The Triviality 
Barrier.” Western Folklore 29:1–8.

If folklorists studying the play of children and adolescents know any piece 
of writing by Brian, it is probably this 1970 essay, a plea for scholars to take 
seriously what he calls “childlore.” Advanced, industrialist societies like ours tend 
to value work foremost and play only for its temporary, restorative relief from 
work (as “recreation”). In such a society, Brian argues, “fun” (a main feature of 
play) is thought to be trivial. Work requires a “mature” attitude in contrast with 
the “immaturity” of play. People in an industrial, competitive culture like ours 
value instrumental behavior more than expressive behavior. And apparently so 
do scholars of play, argues Brian, in that those scholars tend to emphasize the 
functionalist interpretation of the instrumental behavior—play as anticipatory 
socialization for what skills the adult will need in that society, for example—rather 
than add to their analysis an understanding of the expressive pleasure of play. The 
child’s play is “autotelic,” self-sustaining, fun (p. 4). 

A developmental psychologist himself, Brian makes the surprising complaint 
that psychology has “little to offer” in understanding these expressive dimensions 
of play. The humanists are the scholars who understand and appreciate the 
joyful, expressive, autotelic dimensions of play (p. 4). For this reason, Brian 
insists that the study of play must be interdisciplinary. There is room for the 
developmentalists, of course, but the literary scholars, the historians, the art 
historians, and the humanistic social scientists provide necessary views. Actually, 
Brian sees two new (in 1970) areas of psychological research that promise an 
understanding of expressive behavior—research on creativity, and observational 

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research (in Head Start and poverty programs) that temper the sociobiological 
enthusiasms of developmental psychology and show us that “there is no natural 
and universal language of lore for all children” (p. 5). Sociohistorical forces lead to 
different “expressive formal systems” in childlore (p. 5; see Goodwin 1991 for an 
example of the work by one of his students). 

To demonstrate the power of an interdisciplinary analysis of the particular 
influences of culture on childlore, Brian offers an example from the work he did 
with anthropologist John Roberts studying children’s games cross-culturally (see 
above). The example is the game of Tick Tack Toe (pp. 6–8). I shall not reproduce 
that discussion here but want to note simply that understanding the cultural 
variants in playing this seemingly simple game, including the gender differences, 
require perspectives from anthropology and history.

III.

Brian Sutton-Smith. 1979. “The Play of Girls.” In Women in Context: 
Becoming Female, ed. by C. B. Kopp and M. Kirkpatrick, 228–57. New York: 
Plenum.

We have seen in the first two articles discussed here that from his earliest work 
Brian was interested in gender differences in children’s play and childlore. This 
interest was not unusual among developmental psychologists, but their studies 
in controlled settings (e.g., schools and labs) spoke only to issues of human 
development. Brian was rare among the developmental psychologists in that 
he wanted to study children in natural settings, where children exercise a great 
deal more freedom and agency than they do in classrooms and labs. He wanted 
to understand children’s lives as much as possible as they were experiencing 
everyday life, not through the controlled lenses of adults who themselves 
projected so much upon the children. 

The scholarly and everyday cultural landscapes of the 1970s saw the rise of 
feminist theory and its challenge to the generalizations in psychology, history, 
and other disciplines based on the study of men’s lives. In psychology, perhaps 
the most influential book coming out of this era was Carol Gilligan’s In a 
Different Voice (1982), in which she sparred with Lawrence Kohlberg and his 
characterization of girls as “less mature” than boys in their moral reasoning. Not 
less mature, argued Gilligan, just different. The feminist research of the 1970s 
provided the ideas for the rise of interdisciplinary women’s studies courses and 
programs in universities.

The sociocultural landscape in the U.S. was changing, as well. The social 
movements of the 1960s challenged the patriarchy. The women’s movement 
and, after Stonewall in 1969, the gay rights movement challenged masculine, 
heteronormative understandings of gender and sexuality. Laws in cities, states, 
and at the federal level increasingly forbade discrimination based on gender, 
and although it failed to gain the necessary number of ratifications from state 
legislatures by the 1979 deadline, the proposed (in 1972) Equal Rights Amendment 

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(“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United 
States or by any State on account of sex”) to the Constitution came very close 
to passing. What did become federal law was Title IX of the U.S. Education 
Amendments of 1972, a law of significant relevance to the play of girls and young 
women. Title IX forbids discrimination in school activities on the basis of gender, 
thereby opening to girls and women equal opportunities in organized sports. In 
many ways Title IX is the most important, empowering social experiment in the 
past forty years, and Brian understood that. His 1979 book chapter was published 
in that new world.

In an effort to push the study of play beyond the textual approach and into 
the realm of context, Brian here proposes that “sports themselves can be used 
as the metaphor for preliminary thinking about the context of play,” and his 
communication approach to sports requires seeing the roles and performances of 
the “quadralogue”: coach, player, co-player, and spectators (p. 231). Brian then 
proceeds to review the current research on the play of girls using this “sportive 
theory of play.”

Here is what I find so significant about this chapter by Brian, apart from its 
being the first comprehensive survey of what we know about the play of girls 
(we need another). First, Brian shows how the arc of the history of girls’ play is 
toward bringing it closer to boys’ play. The games of girls shifted in the twentieth 
century from a focus on themes of status and marriage to themes of egalitarian 
competition (p. 233). Title IX accelerated that change in the 1970s, notes Brian, as 
girls and young women have access to team sports previously played exclusively 
by boys and men. Note that Brian added an “Epilogue” to this chapter just as 
he was preparing it for publication, an epilogue that discusses some research 
by one of his students on the advice manuals for professional women in the 
1970s, advice manuals that recognize that one of the goals of Title IX was to give 
girls and young women a socialization in play and games closely resembling 
the socialization experiences boys and young men bring to the professional, 
bureaucratic, patriarchal organizations the women were entering in increasing 
numbers in the 1970s (pp. 251–54). 

Second, Brian’s survey of girls’ play and games (always drawing comparisons 
with boys’ play and games) introduces ethnic differences as another source of 
variation. Brian’s chapter takes advantage of the new attention to ethnicity and 
social class in the 1960s and 1970s.

 Oddly missing from this chapter is the attention Brian pays elsewhere to the 
influences of the mass-media (especially television) on girls’ play and games. He 
and his graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania were paying attention 
to this influence at the same time (e.g., Sutton-Smith 1981).

It is important to recognize before leaving the discussion of this important 
chapter that Brian mentored a good many female graduate students and young 
female scholars, and they, in turn, have provided us with the close ethnography 
of children’s play, especially the play of games and girls, which only female 
researchers can accomplish. I have in mind scholars like Diana Kelly-Byrne 
(1989), Linda Hughes (1993; 1995), Marjorie Goodwin (1991; 2006), and Felicia R. 
McMahon (2007), among others.

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IV.

Brian Sutton-Smith and Diana Kelly-Byrne. 1984. “The Masks of Play.” In 
The Masks of Play, ed. by Brian Sutton-Smith and Diana Kelly-Byrne, 184–
99. New York: Leisure Press.

I return to this essay more often than to any other by Sutton-Smith. A fan of 
Bateson’s work, I also recognize that Bateson’s idea of the play frame and its 
paradoxes betrays an uncharacteristically romantic view from someone whose 
scientific credentials and rhetoric do not really prepare the reader to see that 
romantic notion. But Sutton-Smith, also a fan of Bateson’s theory of play and 
fantasy, saw early the romantic streak in Bateson. Goffman’s appropriation in 
Frame Analysis (1974) of Bateson’s notion of frame recognizes what Bateson 
apparently did not—namely, that not all players are in the frame voluntarily, that 
players bring to the frame different power, and that some players can use the 
play frame for ulterior motives. Hence, Goffman argues that all social reality is 
constructed, maintained, and repaired using the same communication devices 
as one finds in the confidence game, a social constructionist view that I have 
embraced and used since reading Berger and Luckmann (1967) in the early 1970s. 
Sutton-Smith and Kelly-Byrne’s (hereafter S-S/K-B) way of making this point is to 
provide a typology and examples of the ways people mask other motives with the 
play frame, as when a sibling uses the “I was only playing” defense when using 
the play frame to hurt a sibling more than necessary in a game. 

I have found the idea of the masks of play, including the “deep play” Geertz 
writes about, endlessly useful in my writing (e.g., about deep play by warriors 
and veterans—see Mechling 2012; Wallis and Mechling, in press). On re-reading 
the essay for this occasion, though, I have seen some things that are there—some 
things that have always been there—that have slipped my mind. For instance, 
S-S/K-B take a gentle swipe at all the authors in the volume they edited, a volume 
of papers first delivered at a TAASP meeting. It seems to S-S/K-B that despite 
all the research on play presented at the conference and in this volume, the 
“most general strategy for not studying child play seems to be to write articles 
on their functions and pretty much to ignore the detailed moment by moment 
description of the experience itself as if we already know what that experience 
is” (1984:186). Ouch. That sentence summarizes beautifully and accusingly the 
purely functionalist approach to play, a critique S-S repeatedly made throughout 
his career. He did not deny that play has functions, but why (he asks here 
and elsewhere) stand so far away from play that the scholar cannot attempt to 
express the inexpressible, the pure joy and fun that the player experiences when 
entering that state of FLOW described by Csikszentmihalyi (1975)? Amidst all the 
analysis in The Ambiguity of Play (1997), Brian’s point in that book is that is that 
we need to understand that play is not merely instrumental, that it is expressive, 
consummatory, joyful, and fun. This is why Brian appreciated so much the 
research that somehow approached the child’s experience of play, not an easy 
task for adults trying to access the “experience” a child is having while playing.

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It may seem contradictory that, immediately after making the point that a 
functionalist analysis of play may be a necessary but not sufficient moment in 
understanding play, S-S/K-B begin their catalog of ways play masks motives and 
ways other frames mask play, a “function” of play. But S-S/K-B are alert to the 
pleasures of these masked activities, most of which boil down to the pleasure of 
exercising power in a situation. “Children would rather argue the game than play 
it. The joy is the power of control rather than the play” (1984:190). Note how 
between Brian’s earlier interest (with John Roberts) in the structures and functions 
of games and the 1984 “masks” essay, Brian has come to see more interesting 
the pleasures of power children experience in playing and arguing the game. 
The example S-S/K-B use in the section of this essay on “Masks for Power” is 
childhood initiation rites, a topic of great usefulness to me as I have explored folk 
initiations in Scouting and in fraternities and sports teams (Mechling 2008b; 2009; 
see also Bronner 2006; 2012). Usually the players in children’s folk initiations, both 
those being initiated and those doing the initiation, are enjoying the event, though 
a few of those doing the hazing or initiating may be using the ritual or play frame 
as a mask for other motives.

S-S/K-B recognize that a great deal of the power play in children’s and 
adolescents’ folk initiations puts forbidden parts of the body and taboo functions 
(urination, for example) at the center of the invented initiation, just as they are 
in much of children’s lore (Mechling 1986). Brian understood that children’s lore 
is profane and “dirty”; I think that is why he appreciated my first TAASP paper 
on the game of Poison Pit played by the Boys Scouts I studied, a game involving 
urine and references to menstruation (Mechling 1980; 2001). When Geertz (1983) 
outlined the qualities of “common sense,” a type of knowledge deeply implicated 
in the study of folk ideas and folklore, he added “earthy” after a list that includes 
“naturalness,” “practicalness,” and “immethodicalness.” “Earthiness” is Geertz’s 
(1983:93) polite term for transgressive, profane, obscene, and taboo. As far as 
Brian was concerned, if the scholar clings to the romantic view of the child and 
ignores the fact that children enjoy forbidden, obscene, profane, and cruel play, 
that scholar has no hope of understanding the child’s experience of play.

In my own work I have found very useful the S-S/K-B discussion of play as a 
“mask for danger,” recognizing the thrill and pleasure of risk-taking. They make 
room for what Geertz (1973) calls “deep play,” a phrase originated by Jeremy 
Bentham for play in which the stakes are so high (loss of fortune, health, or life) 
that the play is irrational from the utilitarian standpoint. S-S/K-B had their college 
students give accounts of their own experiences with dangerous, “deep play,” and 
the authors reproduce several examples (college students continue the patterns 
of adolescent play). Even without the irrational risk, “dark play” (with death, 
for example) carries pleasure. I see this in the sorts of vernacular photography 
(snapshots) by warriors (Mechling 2012) and in the accounts of dark play in 
warriors’ memoirs and fiction (Wallis and Mechling, in press).

S-S/K-B, near the end of this chapter, come back to their critique of the 
scholars of play, and their surprising turn is to accuse even Bateson of creating a 
metamask. Put briefly, they focus on Bateson’s point (in his “Theory of Play and 
Fantasy,” the foundational essay on play frames) that “the peculiarity of play … 

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is that it is a mixture of primary and secondary process (S-S and K-B 1984:195; 
Bateson 1972:185). S-S/K-B fault Bateson for dwelling only on the secondary 
(conscious) process of play’s psychodynamics while neglecting the primary 
(unconscious) process:

Because his [Bateson’s] own concern was largely with communication 
and metacommunication, he has made it easier to talk about the logic 
of play than about its illogic. Unwittingly, he has contributed to the 
idealization and bowdlerization of play, which has been a part of the 
twentieth century’s “scientific” approach to play. (Sutton-Smith and 
Kelly-Byrne 1984:196)

The corrective prescribed by S-S/K-B is to bring to the analysis of play both 
“Bateson’s paradox” and “Freud’s disguise,” to see the ways play both is like a 
dream (the title of Bateson’s essay is “Toward a Theory of Play and Fantasy,” 
after all) and not like a dream; play both is about reality and not about reality (p. 
196). The authors propose that we who study play “combine the Freudian view of 
ambivalence with the Batesonian attitude to paradox” (p. 197), and they suggest 
the neologism play as paraguise to capture the “scientific unidealized study of 
play” they hope for.

V.

Sutton-Smith, B., J. Gerstmyer, and A. Meckley. 1988. “Playfighting as 
Folkplay Amongst Preschool Children.” Western Folklore 47 (3):161–76.

When teaching and writing about Bateson’s frame theory of play and fantasy, I 
have always found playfighting to be the best example of framed communication 
where the messages exchanged within the frame (ruled by the metamessage “this 
is play”) do not mean what they would mean outside the frame. Most recently, 
John Paul Wallis and I found in Bateson’s paradoxical playfighting frame the key 
to understanding why soldiers and Marines in combat zones engage in rough-and-
tumble (R&T) playfighting, a surprising example of deep play when played in an 
active combat zone (Wallis and Mechling, in press). As Brian and his co-authors 
note, playfighting has been of interest to scholars of play for a long time, but what 
Brian’s team of graduate students brings to the topic is access to Philadelphia 
preschools and the ability to record actual instances of playfighting in “natural 
settings,” in context. 

Brian and his co-authors plunge into the 1980s debate about “war play” and 
whether children should be allowed to play with toy guns, a debate that rages 
today (Mechling 2008a). This is a topic of great concern to parents and teachers, 
sometimes to politicians, and to the general public. The death of a twelve-year-old 
boy, Tamir Rice, in Cleveland on March 2, 2015, shot dead almost instantly by a 
police officer arriving on the scene and taking the boy’s pellet gun for a real one, 
is only one among many tragedies and near-tragedies involving children’s play 

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with toy guns. So the debate Brian and his students entered in the 1980s is far 
from old and far from trivial.

What Brian’s team of graduate students can contribute to this debate is actual 
ethnographic description and analysis of children’s playfighting. Brian gave his 
student researchers two tasks in their fieldwork in the preschools: “to look for 
the relationships between playfighting and aggression and for any distinctions 
between them, and to look for the influences of television and of the teachers 
upon the children’s play” (p. 164). With this assignment, the researchers worked in 
nine preschools, taking notes on the play of two hundred children aged three to 
five years. 

As in my discussion of the first four “easy pieces,” I shall not summarize the 
findings here except to say what I find so useful in the article for my own work. 
First, boys’ drive to play with guns is almost impossible to extinguish, even in 
those schools (e.g., university-related schools and Quaker schools) where the anti-
gun, anti-wartoy policies were most strict (p. 169–70). The power of that drive 
obviously is something scholars and policymakers need to be able to understand.

Second, most of the aggression in these playfighting games is stylized 
aggression, often cloaked literally in the folk-contrived costumes suggesting 
superheroes and fantasy characters the children observe on television and in 
movies (p. 168). While the authors do not explicitly make the points I draw 
from this observation, I want to make the connections here. I concur with Jones 
(2002) that children need early experience with stylized aggression, especially as 
an alternative to real aggression. In fact, Brian’s students discovered cases where 
the children actually controlled and contained the real aggression of a player by 
making him abide by the rules of the fantasy play and stylized aggression (p. 174). 

Third, and still on this topic of stylized aggression, the researchers found what 
was to them a surprising degree of folk-imposed sex segregation, and it was 
primarily (by far) the boys who participated in the playfighting (p. 171). Looking 
back at Brian’s “The Play of Girls” and his brief discussion of the changes wrought 
by Title IX, one wonders where and how girls and young women acquire the skills 
of stylized aggression they will need to perform in organizational cultures that still 
resemble the culture of the male friendship group as honed on playing field.

Fourth, I value the ethnographic confirmation in this work that television 
programs aimed at kids clearly influence the playfighting. And the fieldwork 
observations should put to rest (but they won’t—this is a resistant belief) adults’ 
worried view that aggression and violence in children’s television programs results 
in real violence and aggression in children. What the ethnographic evidence shows 
is what I found to be true in the Boy Scout troop I studied, namely, that children 
and youth appropriate from mass-mediated, popular culture those symbols and 
narrative themes they find useful in their own folk cultures, their own folkplay. Put 
differently, those adults who still believe in the direct influence of popular culture 
on children fail to appreciate the true agency of children and youth. And the 
only way to appreciate fully that agency is to observe carefully and for prolonged 
periods of time the actual ways children play. 

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Conclusion

The most recent of the Sutton-Smith “Five Easy Pieces” I have recommended 
here was published in 1988, very nearly thirty years ago. Brian continued writing 
through those years, and luckily for us he wrote a substantial memoir about his 
life and work in 2008 for the newly launched American Journal of Play. That 
memoir, “Play Theory: A Personal Journey and New Thoughts” (2008), recounts 
the phases of his thinking about play and sketches his journey from naughty play 
in his New Zealand youth to the project he was working on in his last days, a 
book that was to be titled Play as Emotional Survival, ideas which he presented in 
his keynote address at a TASP Conference in 2007 at the Strong National Museum 
of Play (which holds the Sutton-Smith Papers). In that address Brian explained 
that (as the handout outline for his address puts it) the address and book would 
be “my response to my deconstruction of play theories without providing an 
alternative in The Ambiguity of Play, 1997.” What is clear from Brian’s lecture is 
that he was drawn more and more to a Darwinian explanation for the power and 
durability of the play instinct. 

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 2005 book, Descartes’s Error (see also 
Damasio 1999) gave Brian scientific support for his belief that within us is a 
dualism, a struggle between the “primary emotions” of fear, anger, happiness, and 
so on, all expressed in play one way or the other, and the “secondary emotions” 
(pride, envy, guilt, shame), which “act as basic play regulators from rules to 
referees” (keynote lecture abstract 2007). Play’s evolutionary role, argues Brian, 
is “to bond all of these opposites (a synergy) into this new form of behavior” 
(keynote lecture abstract 2007). In evolutionary terms, as animals evolved from 
the “reflexivity” of reptiles to the “reflectivity” of mammals, play emerges as a 
behavior that enables mammals “to balance these two adaptive systems [reflexivity 
and reflectivity] without choosing the wrong one on any given occasion” (keynote 
lecture abstract 2007). Play is “an alternative theatric synthesis of reflexive and 
reflective response systems (which is supported in neural terms by the interaction 
between amygdala and frontal lobes)” (keynote lecture handout 2007). In terms 
of my own research, for example, the stylized aggression in playfighting among 
male warriors in combat zones provides a “theatric synthesis” of the two adaptive 
systems, reflexivity and reflectivity, under stressful circumstances (Wallis and 
Mechling, in press). 

Brian did not live to complete this work, but he left us enough of a trail for us 
to follow him toward a theory of play that incorporates the most recent thinking in 
evolution and brain science. In the 2008 article he called this his “third theory of 
play” (the first being “play as a viability variable” and the second being “culturally 
relative play forms”) and he outlined the theory in terms of four “adaptive layers” 
(2008:113–17). It is up to us to see where Brian’s third theory of play leads us in 
understanding the play experience in children, adolescents, and adults.

In all of Brian’s work, then, from early to late, you can find the distinct 
perspective he began with, i.e., a commitment to understanding children’s play 
as experienced by the children, a firm confidence that children’s experiences 
can be studied scientifically without losing the magic of their play, a respect for 

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the agency of children, a refusal to romanticize the child, an understanding that 
children can be mean and obscene and profane, a commitment to championing 
children’s right to free play, and an insistence that functionalist analysis of play 
must be complemented by analysis that understands the autotelic nature of play.

Sadly, what has changed is the flow of ethnographic work directed by and 
inspired by Brian. It is difficult to see whether the decline in ethnographic studies 
of the folk cultures of children and youth is due to waning interest by scholars 
or to the cultural and legal difficulties of studying children in “natural settings” 
rather than in classrooms and laboratories, controlled settings subject to the 
governmental and institutional rules for studying “human subjects.” There are 
occasional bright spots, like Clark’s In a Younger Voice (2011), and Clark shares 
Brian’s views of how to study children (see also Clark 1995). In gatherings of 
folklorists and others who know the unique value of ethnographic study of 
children’s lives, though, scholars often exchange stories and laments about the 
difficulty of getting their university IRBs (Institutional Review Boards—those 
committees that approve research with human subjects) to even understand the 
nature of qualitative research on children in natural settings, much less approve 
the research. Usually staffed by natural scientists and social scientists who take 
seriously the word “scientist” in their field and only rarely staffed by the lone 
humanist or two, most IRBs see our fieldwork with children as unscientific and 
maybe dangerous. Indeed, another genre of stories shared by male folklorists 
who have attempted to study children in the natural settings of playgrounds and 
neighborhood streets and beaches is the “the time mothers on the playground 
called the police when I was trying to talk with their kids” story. Parents’ concerns 
are understandable, if overblown (see Best 1993), but a combination of the 
difficulty of getting a research project approved by the IRB and then, if approved, 
the difficulty of getting adults in those natural settings to understand and accept 
the research methods of fieldwork with children has meant that many folklorists 
find it much easier to abandon the ethnography of children’s lives altogether. This 
is a great loss.

Brian’s grand project, passed down to his students and to those like-minded 
colleagues who knew him, and the principles guiding his project are in danger 
of being extinguished. I do not have a solution to the IRB problem or to the 
problems in American culture that nurture fear for and over-protection of children 
(e.g., witness the recent debate over “free range children” parenting practices and 
the actual legal trouble for parents who let their kids roam free). We will always 
have our own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews to study and 
write about, but that “sample” is limited and skewed. I wish, for example, that we 
had enough fieldwork based on the play of girls in formal and informal settings 
that someone will write an updated version of “The Play of Girls.”

Brian never accepted the ways adults (parents, teachers, coaches, politicians) 
project their fears onto children or the many ways adults try to contain and control 
the play of children. My wish is that this very personal review of five of the essays 
by Brian that I return to again and again will recruit readers to Brian’s “project,” 
that there are enough sprites or even sprites-in-training reading this that we will 

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conspire somehow to continue Brian’s work, even against the bureaucratic and 
cultural forces against us. For the children.

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