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Nevertheless, the future development of play studies seems limited by the deficiencies of the multi-disciplinary model used within academia as a whole and by the interests of the specialists who heretofore have gathered at the table. In what is probably the most important work on the nature of play in recent years, Sutton-Smith (1997) has argued that the play studies literature can be organized in terms of seven major “rhetorics” or “ideologies,” each with its own characteristic way of approaching the subject. For example, certain researchers have focused on play as “progress,” as creative or recreational activity that promotes the personal growth of players. Other researchers, he argues, have focused on play as “power,” emphasizing forms of social contest or confrontation that may be functional for society as whole. Still other scholars have seen play as an exploration of chance or fate, as an occasion for social bonding, as imaginative manipulation, as a special pattern of personal experience or selfhood, and as a pattern of foolery and status inversion. Scholars focusing on ancient and traditional societies frequently highlight the rhetorics of power, community identity, frivolity, and fate. Students of the modern world tend to favor the rhetorics of progress, imagination, and the self.
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Thomas S. Henricks (Play Reconsidered: Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression)