Imaginative Play The earliest evidence of imaginative play comes at about the ag

Imaginative Play
The earliest evidence of imaginative play comes at about the age of two, in the form of fragmentary stories. Play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith describes these fragments as partial narratives: They are not a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. They may be just the beginning or middle. In time, children develop the ability to create a complete narrative. This progression occurs in children worldwide, and is an integral aspect of their play. Children are gleeful as they tell their stories. In his book, The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith also focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct “rhetorics”—the ancient discourses of Fate, Power, Communal Identity, and Frivolity and the modern discourses of Progress, the Imaginary, and the Self. This work reveals more distinctions and disjunctions than affinities, with one striking exception: however different their descriptions and interpretations of play, each rhetoric reveals a quirkiness, redundancy, and flexibility. In light of this, Sutton-Smith suggests that play might provide a model of the variability that allows for “natural” selection. As a form of mental feedback, play might nullify the rigidity that sets in after successful adaption, thus reinforcing animal and human variability. In addition to spoken stories, there are imaginative play adventures which contain both real and make-believe elements. The power of human imagination to create and innovate has built our modern world, and being playfully imaginative continues to nourish the spirit.
Brian Sutton-Smith (1924–2015) was one of the foremost play scholars of the last 100 years. His The Ambiguity of Play (1997) stands alongside Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens(1938) and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games (1961) as a touchstone of play theory. For more than half a century, in more than 350 books and articles, Sutton-Smith led or synthesized all the major advances in play studies. In The Folkstories of Children he collected 500 examples of children’s made-up stories, taken from a study of a New York City private preschool and alternative public elementary school. The children from whomthese stories were taken were put in the schools by parents who wanted the best for their offspring; Sutton-Smith calls them the “bright kids” who will be the leaders of tomorrow [p.34). These bright kids are indeed verbally acute, attuned to things that go bump in the day as well as the night.
Sutton-Smith argues that instead of looking for a model of mind in computers, decision trees, or binary structures, the mind can best be seen in the telling of stories. The stories of young children are not always informed by a syntax of chronicity. Perhaps this suggests two kinds of storytelling minds: one, a linear, chronological mind and another, a foregrounding, relational mind. This is important to language acquisition, speech play, and the development of fantasy. The body of the book is divided into two major sections, the first filled with stories in verse form taken from children two to four years old, and the second filled with plot stories from children ages five through ten. You will notice that even in the older children the narratives are “partial” in the sense that there will be leaps of logic or relational connections in the stories. There is not much exposition and as children tell stories they are making connections that they expect their audience to understand.
Here is the link to the The Folkstories of Children ebook in the ASU Library. https://search.lib.asu.edu/permalink/01ASU_INST/fdcm53/cdi_askewsholts_vlebooks_9780812207392
The book is organized by age of the child. Pick a chapter and find a partial narrative story that you find interesting.
Part 1.
Write down your theme from the Design Project: Object Play Experience, Parts 1-3 assignment in Part 1. Using what you learned about Imaginative Play re-evaluate your theme and deduce what part of your theme and symbology might be particularly relevant to a game designed for Imaginative Play. Write down how Imaginative Play is aligned with your theme and symbology.
Theme: The importance of personal connections and relationships, growth and learning through life experiences, and balancing different aspects of life.
Part 2.
Pick a chapter and find a partial narrative story that you find interesting from the The Folkstories of Children ebook in the ASU Library. Copy down the entire partial narrative into a word document.
Sutton-Smith argues that there are two kinds of storytelling minds: one, a linear, chronological mind and another, a foregrounding, relational mind. Which one do you gravitate toward? Explain why.
Pick an artist who uses partial narratives in their work (see the table above for a list of artists). Write down why this artist resonates with you and why.
Then write a backstory for a partial narrative game (300 words or so) using your theme and symbology.
Part 3.
Download, print, and play the free game Bolets. https://www.pnparcade.com/products/bolets It is a solo game so you have to play in solo mode.
It is important to play this game so that you have first hand knowledge of what a sliding puzzle tiling table top game is. Journal your play experience and reverse engineer the core loop by bullet pointing the steps in the loop. Write down the experience of solving the problem and game mechanics that really made the game fun for you.
Theme