Showing papers in "American Journal of Play in 2017"

Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change

Abstract: The first section of this book is devoted to working through the complex definition of what constitutes a “knowledge game,” and more specifically, what does not. Schrier’s book is a substantial literature review of the vast – and rapidly growing – field of games that contribute to knowledge production. “Knowledge games,” by her definition, are “the set of practices, contexts, designs, and relationships that emerge from and around those games with a goal or sub-goal of generating new knowledge about humanity, society, the universe, and any previously unknown phenomena” (26). In contrast to games such as “citizen science games,“ “crowd games,” “collective games,” “participatory games,” and “human games,” Schrier takes great care to delineate that she is exploring only those games which seek to produce knowledge, solve authentic, applicable problems, and/or “generate new ideas and possibilities for real world change” (25).

Ethology, Interpersonal Neurobiology, and Play: Insights into the Evolutionary Origin of the Arts.

Abstract: F or more than five decades, I have investigated and pondered the biological basis of the arts. When, where, and how did the arts begin in human evolution? Why did they arise and become an enduring part of the human repertoire on every continent and in every environment and cultural group, and evident even in every toddler and child? Is there a common feature that characterizes all art?My first (and continuing) point of departure is ethology-the biology of behavior. Because the way of life (behavior) of any animal has evolved to help it survive in a particular environment, ethologists observe animals in their natural habitat. Because the human species has spent more than 99 percent of its time on earth living as hunter-gatherers, my focus (on the human animal) has been on pre modern or traditional ways of life.When looking for universal features of the arts, contemporary ideas about arts and aesthetics are misleading. Traditional societies often have no word for art, even though they practice arts in forms such as decorating (bodies and objects), carving, singing, dancing, drumming, chanting, playing instruments, speaking poetically, giving dramatic presentations, enhancing their surroundings-and have words for all these activities. Such societies also have words for beauty, skill, and even aesthetic value, but they do not discourage or prohibit beginners and bunglers from attempts to display them. Nor do they always expect art to be harmonious, spiritual, or even creative-the usual characteristics that Western aesthetics require to call something art.I wondered whether the common denominator for art should be sought not in one or another quality (noun or adjective) but in what art makers and participants did (a verb). My first question then became: "What do people- ordinary people, including children, as well as artists-do when they engage in art?" Emphasizing behavior-what people do, rather than what art is-was a new and appropriately ethological approach to the subject of art.My answer has emerged over the years, influenced by what I learned-often accidentally from something I happened to read or hear. Crucial pieces of my thinking about art concern the two subjects covered in this special issue of the American Journal of Play: play and interpersonal neurobiology. It began with the former (Dissanayake 1974) and some two decades later incorporated the latter (Dissanayake 1999).An unexpected new hypothesis (the artification hypothesis) emerged from my work in these two fields. Additionally, in my quest to understand how art began, I discovered a plausible evolutionary explanation for how and why interpersonal neurobiology in humans itself began in the common, ordinary playful interactions between ancestral hominin mothers and infants. No one else has proposed this, which I describe in this article. "Hominin," here, refers to the group that consists of modern humans, extinct human species, and all our immediate ancestors-that is, members of the genera Homo Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus. It replaces the older, and more comprehensive label, "hominid," which today includes all modern and extinct great apes-that is, modern humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans plus all their immediate ancestors.Crucial Components of the Artification HypothesisPlayIn the 1960s, when I began my investigation of human art making, little had been written about art as a universal biological endowment of evolution except for an influential book by ethologist Desmond Morris. In The Biology of Art (1962), he described painting by captive primates, and he traced mark making to play. An ethological study of play in mammals by a German ethologist (MeyerHolzapfel 1956) described characteristics of animal play that struck me as similar to some characteristics of the arts. First, animal play is not serious, which does not contradict the reminder by many authors that play is serious business but instead makes the point that it is not directly concerned with survival-finding food, seeking a mate, or desperately fighting a foe. …

Teaching Us to Fear: The Violent Video Game Moral Panic and The Politics of Game Research.

Abstract: In this excerpt from their new book, Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong (BenBella Books, 2017), the authors present an argument in defense of video games while dispelling the myth that such games lead to real-world violence. The authors define and examine moral panics and provide guidelines for identifying and understanding this phenomenon. They focus in particular on how the moral panic around video games has affected scientific research on games.

Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader

Abstract: Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader Marcus Carter, Kelly Bergstrom, and Darryl Woodford, eds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Introduction, contributors, and index. 230 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 978081669908EVE Online is a game I wish I played. The reasons that I do not are numerous but Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business highlights one of the most crucial: it is a game space that appears actually to discourage participation. It has a steep learning curve, requires a large commitment of time from participants, and has frequent and brutal sanctions against failure. The editors even go so far as to claim that the game "scream[s] 'don't play me' as a new user" because if "a video game should always be fun, then EVE Online isn't a very good video game" (p. xi). Perhaps that is why, although EVE Online was released by CCP Games to the public over thirteen years ago, it has not received nearly the academic scrutiny many other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft have received. And yet the fifteen essays, written by a mix of academics, developers, and players, tackle the issue of this game's definitive and enduring appeal to a highly dedicated player base. In doing so, they additionally expand our understanding of how to conceptualize both the nature of a game and the notion of what is entailed in the activity of play.Incorporating chapters from academic researchers and those who design and play the game allows a nuanced look into the experience of EVE Online. These researchers provide perspectives that, we can argue, are lacking in other collections attempting to explain the workings and appeal of an online gaming experience. The chapters by the game players and developers do, indeed, give the reader insight into EVE Online that can be especially useful because of the game's unique nature. It is not a game easily undertaken to get a brief feel for the game. I find, then, these perspectives of seasoned players beneficial, though these chapters tend, quite understandably, not to be as complex or long as the chapters written by scholars.The editors organized the book into three general areas. The first section concerns the structural design of EVE Online and how it affects player experience. Kelly Bergstrom and Marcus Carter's chapter serves as an overview of the game, its structures, rules, and some of its unique play styles. The chapter also provides necessary background for those unfamiliar with this MMORPG before delving into more theoretical discussions. Christopher Paul's chapter tackles the central reason for EVE Online's extremely high difficulty curve. Paul argues that the game's difficulty serves to construct a player base that becomes more passionate and driven to interact with the game while also creating players invested in maintaining the unique characteristics of the EVE Online experience. …

Vygotsky Meets Neuroscience: The Cerebellum and the Rise of Culture through Play.

Abstract: IntroductionIn the last million years, the human cerebellum, an unusually dense and furrowed structure tucked under the two brain hemispheres, has increased three- to fourfold in size, and in the evolutionary process it has gained massive connections with the highest cognitive functions in the cerebral cortex (Bostan, Dum, and Strick 2013; Imamizu et al. 2007; Leggio and Molinari 2015; Leiner, Leiner, and Dow 1986, 1989; Stoodley, Valera, and Schmahmann 2012; Strick, Dum, and Fiez 2009). I have recently argued that because the cerebellum builds models from repetitive behavioral, cognitive, and affective processes; operates at an unconscious level; and creatively predicts and anticipates future circumstances, it-and not the cerebral cortex as traditionally thought-has played the prominent role in the origin, maintenance, and advancement of culture (Vandervert 2016a). I define culture in this article as the beliefs and activities learned through socialization and shared by the members of a particular group of people, with socialization being "the process of learning the meanings and practices that enable us to make sense of and behav[e] appropriately in that culture," (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2012, 15).PurposeIn this article, I discuss the impact of the dramatic increase in the size of the cerebellum over the last million years that drove animal play and then human play toward the genesis of culture. Specifically, I follow Spinka, Newberry, and Bekoff (2001), who defined play as "training for the unexpected." Beginning from this perspective, I argue that animal play evolved toward human play as the cerebellum expanded its ability to adapt to the unexpected by predicting and anticipating future circumstances-and that animal play, human play, and culture serve the same general adaptive purposes. Given this, I contend that the insights, principles, and conclusions related specifically to play of Lev Vygotsky's Mind in Society (1978) are essentially correct and make strong intuitive sense because they derive from the evolutionary, cerebellum-driven origin of culture through play.First, however, I think it helpful to offer a brief sketch of the new research concerning the behavioral, cognitive, and affective contributions (including creativity) of the cerebellum as it has evolved over the last million years.The Other Four-Fifths of the Brain's Neurons and the Evolution of Play and CultureIn two watershed articles, Leiner, Leiner, and Dow (1986, 1989) pointed out that over the last million years the human cerebellum increased three- to fourfold in size and had, in the process, developed new neural projections (pathways) to the prefrontal and associated areas of the cerebral cortex. Based on this enor- mous increase and the new connections with the highest cognitive areas of the cerebral cortex, Leiner, Leiner, and Dow (1986) convincingly argued that the cerebellum had thereby evolved beyond its initial function of initiating motor activity to a surprisingly expanded role of "the skillful manipulation of ideas" (444). They further pointed out that the increase was accompanied by twenty million nerve tracks on each side of the brain going from the cerebral cortex (including from the limbic, parietal, and prefrontal areas for planning and language functions) to the cerebellum (Leiner, Leiner, and Dow 1986, 1989). By comparison each of the two optic nerves contain approximately one million nerve tracts running back to the visual areas of the brain. In addition to these forty million nerve tracts to the cerebellum, there is a bundle of nerve fibers in the cerebellum called the dentate nucleus that conveys a multitude of pathways to the cerebral cortex where planning, language, and emotional processing takes place (Leiner, Leiner, and Dow 1989). I argue that the expansion and differentiation of the dentate nucleus played a key role in the transition from animal play to human play and culture, and I return to the dentate nucleus and that transition in some detail. …

I Am an Avatar of Myself: Fantasy, Trauma, and Self-Deception.

Abstract: The author employs neurobiology to help explore deception in nature and self-deception in human beings. She examines activities that may appear playful but that lack such hallmark qualities of play as equality, mutual pleasure, and voluntarism and that can, therefore, prove psychologically destructive. She warns that the kind of playful interactions of parents and children that help connect the concept of self with the concept of other and to expand children’s imaginative horizons during healthy development may turn defensive and do harm during severe trauma. Such interactions can shrink mental horizons, help separate mind from body, and facilitate the disconnection of the self from others. These devastating outcomes occur especially when play-like activities seem to offer in fantasy a safety absent from real life. The author uses the clinical case of a victim of sexual abuse to illustrate such unhealthy activity and the compulsion and dissociation it creates, which can foster the epigenetic transmission of incest from one generation to the next.

Ronnie, Millie, Lila--Women's History for Games: A Manifesto and a Way Forward.

Abstract: The author discusses how, in practice, historians often obscure the effect of women’s lives, work, and contributions on their topic, and she takes special note of video game history. Using both history and film studies as examples, she argues that games historians can and should adopt feminist viewpoints to help ensure a fuller, more diverse accounting of the past. She examines the stories of three women—video game regulation activist Ronnie Lamm, route operator Amelia “Millie” McCarthy, and Exidy executive Lila Zinter—to demonstrate the types of historical information often overlooked in video game history. She concludes that video game historians must use archives, documents, and other research to think more broadly about the purpose and impact of their own work and not allow video game history to be reduced to a highlights reel that captures only the works of a few key players. Instead, their history should capture the depth and diversity of video games and game culture, including the impact of women on the field.

Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game

Abstract: The author retells the origin story of Sierra On-Line and its historic first product, the graphical adventure game Mystery House. She reviews the academic and journalistic writing that placed the story almost exclusively inside a narrative about early computer games, treating it as a saga of the competition between the graphic adventures Sierra On-Line produced and the literary games developed by companies like Infocom and dubbed interactive fiction. The author argues that such video game history proved both inaccurate and obfuscating, the she uses archival documentation and a counter-historical methodology to describe a different kind origin for Sierra On-Line and to deride the obviousness of presumptive beginnings within the discipline of game history.

The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind

Abstract: The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind Russell Meares New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. Acknowledgments, introduction, references, and author index. 222 pp. $33.56 paper. ISBN: 9780415572347The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind tackles one of the most fascinating mysteries of all: how the human mind comes into being and what distinguishes it from our nearest simian relatives. The book sweeps across evolution and development at a dizzying pace, touching upon biology, philosophy, linguistics, psychotherapy, literature, human development, and neuroscience. Meares's through line is how the germ of mind gets planted in each child initially through play. The process begins with the earliest conversations between mother and child, when instinctively the mother sets up a kind of pretend game that is half real, half imaginary. Mother speaks to baby "as if" the infant understands; and through her words and coos, she pours hopes, dreams, intentions, and perceptions into the space between herself and the baby. Amazingly, from the start, baby does understand mother's love, her underlying intentions, and the nuances of her tone. Through this dialogue, a child slowly internalizes a mother's pictures of inner and outer worlds, eventually understanding even the content of her words.Meares's primary thesis is that these early, playful exchanges between mother and child constitute the origins not only of a baby's mind, but also of what is uniquely human about our capacity to symbolize, including the full range of cultures across place and time. Within the alchemy of love and care for children, Meares asserts that the instinct to play brings the highest expressions of self-creativity and culture.When we read a book, we not only read what the book has to say about the topic at hand, but we also read the personhood of the author. As if by osmosis, readers implicitly understand writers in much the same way that babies internalize the perspectives of their mothers. Such underground communication becomes especially pronounced in books with a well-developed perspective. The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind is just this sort of book. Within a couple of paragraphs of the introduction, I began marveling at the mind of the man behind the words. Meares brings the passion, curiosity, creativity, and compassion of a psychiatrist who has scaled the pinnacles of the healthy, creative mind, yet who has also spent decades working with the broken minds of some of the most troubled, character-disordered patients of all. …

Listening beneath the Words: Parallel Processes in Music and Psychotherapy.

Abstract: IntroductionThe parallels between musical communication and therapeutic dialogue have received relatively little attention in psychoanalytic literature over the years. Yet, musical creativity and improvisation bear striking parallels to the interactive processes involved in the mother-infant affective interplay, the intricate dance of intimacy, and the patient-therapist relational exchange. Just as appreciation of musical content is not limited to explicit analysis of the score and relies on our emotional attunement with the music's unfolding themes and harmonies, a rich body of literature in relational psychoanalysis emphasizes the interplay of the nonverbal and affective dimensions in the clinical interaction and intuition (Knoblauch 2005; Marks-Tarlow 2012a; 2014; Schore 2012). The connection between therapist and patient starts with implicit affective attunement at the level of mirror neuron networks (Iocoboni 2008), progresses to focused attention on verbal and nonverbal communications that envelop a patient's story (such as facial expression, body posture, speech prosody, narrative timing, and eye contact), and includes the complex matrix of transference-countertransference enactments in the treatment setting (Bassen 1989; Schore 2012). The verbal dimension of a patient's presentation can be compared to musical notes that comprise the score of his or her conscious life. A rich, nonverbal prosody carries the melody of the score's interactions and conveys its relational context and its somatic, affective, and associative impact on its listener, that is, the therapist. How is the story told? Why is it told now? What remains untold? What is the message to the therapist? When therapists unconsciously resonate with this relational melody as they consciously follow the development of its themes, they participate with the patient in the process of his or her self-discovery and alter the established trajectory of his or her enactments. In the words of Amini et al. (1996), "The therapist's job is to allow the duet to begin and to take up his/her place in the melody, so that the piece can gradually be directed to a different ending" (234).Can analytical theory and technique successfully accommodate this kind of therapy as performance? Does the therapist cum musician stay detached from the process or become immersed in it? Do therapists look for an objective meaning of the therapeutic or musical story, or do they risk getting lost in the vicissitudes of its subjective and intersubjective interpretations? These are the questions we explore as we investigate the musicality of psychotherapy.Emotions at the Center of Music and Meaning: An Adaptive-Evolutionary PerspectiveHumans respond to music on a deeply emotional level, quite distinct from the semantic analysis of musical form or any associated verbal content. An operatic aria affects the audience on several simultaneous channels not reducible just to the meaning of the words sung or the sequence of the notes played. Both the therapeutic dialogue and complex, multilevel group therapy interactions build on semantic stories, which in turn rest on rich, unconsciously choreographed patterns of self-identity and ways of being with others that drive relations in the here and now.The capacities for making music and telling stories are uniquely human and universal across all known cultures. From the psychoevolutionary perspective, the origins of both music and language likely stem from affectively driven vocalizations of separation and distress, joy, sexual competition, and territoriality. They are the warning calls and exchanges of feeling and intent evident across the mammalian species that represent the affective salience of experience, which is encoded by the limbic cortex (Panksepp 2009). The Differential Affect Theory (Izard 1991) identifies nine basic affects hard wired at birth in all individuals of every human culture from hunter-gatherer tribes to technologically sophisticated political states. …

Sexual Fantasy and Adult Attunement: Differentiating Preying from Playing.

Abstract: The author looks at the psychology of sexuality and its origins in the brain’s cortex. She discusses how the cues for desire sometimes overshadow mere physiological cues and how they may be healthy or unhealthy. She argues that understanding the intricate neurochemical and neurostructural workings of the mind and the central and autonomic nervous systems in both men and women—and their dependence on early attunement—helps therapists and patients distinguish sexual play from predatory, trauma-inducing sexual aggression and that this distinction is crucial given the centrality of the mammalian emotional circuit of play in our brain processes, including the sexual. She discusses the dangers of mistaking forcible rape fantasy for a real-life desire and examines other fantasies and the sexual role play that fuel our sexuality. She warns of the psychological and emotional damages of isolating, nonconsenual sex. And she discusses how sexual play can provide emotional attunement, joy, and sociability to human life.

New.Now?: Or Why a Design History of Coin-Op Video Game Machines

Abstract: The author asks what has occurred in game history scholarship to warrant the use of the adjective “new” in “New Video Game History” and suggests an awareness of process may now be influencing the study of games. In support of this observation, he organizes the article along two interrelated fronts. The first speaks to the on-going process of collection development at cultural institutions while the second addresses a shift in how game history is currently being written. The latter, he argues, demonstrates why we ought to consider carefully what “new” might signal for the critical historical study of games. At length, the article concludes by making a case for turning to design history to write a historical study of Atari’s coin-operated machines.

Collecting, Preserving, and Interpreting the History of Electronic Games

Abstract: Jon-Paul C. Dyson is vice president for exhibits and director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at The Strong. Trained as a cultural and intellectual historian, he joined The Strong in 1998 and has worked on and supervised the development of dozens of exhibits on play and video games. He initiated the museum’s efforts to collect, preserve, and interpret video games in 2006, and today The Strong’s collections are the most comprehensive in the world. He writes frequently on video games and play for both scholarly and general audiences. This interview explores how The Strong has developed its video game collections, what some of the pressing issues are in preserving those materials, and some possible directions that video game scholarship will take in the coming years.

Teaching Kindergarten: Learner-Centered Classrooms for the 21st Century

Abstract: Teaching Kindergarten: Learner-Centered Classrooms for the 21st Century Julie Diamond, Betsy Grob, and Fretta Reitzes, eds. New York, NY: Teachers College Press, 2015. Foreword, prologue, acknowledgments, introduction, children's book list, references, contributors, index. 176 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780807757116At its heart, Teaching Kindergarten: Learner-Centered Classrooms for the 21st Century is a paean to the play-based, interest-driven kindergarten we know from the annals of progressive education. Its ostensible goal, though, is to resist the increasingly more familiar kindergarten, where a skills-based and overtly academic curriculum favors more time on the rug for minilessons and less time on it for building with blocks. But to label Teaching Kindergarten a mere apologia would be to give it short shrift. It is also an up-to-date and highly persuasive argument about why the trend toward all academics all the time is so unnecessary if later academic achievement is truly tied to what children learn in kindergarten. To this end, coeditors and longtime early-childhood educators and leaders Julie Diamond, Betsy Grob, and Fretta Reitzes offer a hefty collection of teachers' stories that demonstrate the advantages of learner-centered-progressive-education for five-year-olds.To this end, we must not be drawn to the book's subtitle over its main one. Yes, the book concerns learner-centered classrooms, but its collective strength lies in its primary appellation: teaching kindergarten. The critical idea is that, although progressive education may embody a belief system about how children learn best, it cannot be separated from an understanding of what teachers actually do in the classroom. The central question is: How is learner-centered teaching enacted?Chapter 1, "Learner-Centered Teaching," by coeditor Julie Diamond, presents as fine an overview of the modern progressive educator's purview as any in teacher education today (full disclosure: I am very briefly cited). Diamond seamlessly aligns John Dewey's vision of teaching "to propel children's learning" (p. 14) with a commitment to culturally responsive teaching in a diverse world. She follows this with short introductions to key points of entry (with references to the ensuing chapters, where they are discussed in greater depth). Diamond has few good things to say about the Common Core and the accountability and standards movement, though she strongly favors rigorous, content-based curriculum, while holding teachers accountable for learning what, as she says, "matters to them and to others" (p. 28).It goes without saying, of course, that topics frequently overlap in the individual chapters. Such is the nature of teaching five-year-olds. All sorts of things happen at once. Stakeholders, too, overlap. A special feature of this book is that many teacher roles are represented in it, often more than one in a chapter. We hear from head teachers, new teachers, staff developers, con- tent specialists, and university educators, as well as the editors, whose comments appear at the end of every chapter.On this crowded landscape, the coeditors have done an impressive job of assembling a gestalt of the teaching day and year. Chapter 2, "Kindergarten: Where It Starts and Where It Goes," by Erin Hyde, Marilyn Martinez, and Yvonne Smith, frames the discussion. In it, Hyde talks about "intentional" teaching, where the needs of the children she has in her classroom that year-and not the children she might imagine-predominate. Math time, rest time, and even outdoor time is planned to "meet the children where they are" (p. 29). Martinez and Smith follow Hyde by responding to questions (from Julie Diamond) that address state standards, teachers' role in facilitating learning, and working with parents. One finds the wisdom of their curricular choices in how they address children's cognitive and social-emotional needs, as well as developmental differences, inside and in addition to the formal curriculum. …

Riddle Hero: Play and Poetry in the Exeter Book Riddles

Abstract: The author discusses the Exeter Book riddles, some of the earliest poems in English, specifically Old English, as perfect examples of how play and poetry intersect. Their playfulness, he claims, is most apparent in the original manuscript, but notes that few modern readers read Old English. The orthography of the manuscript also helps to make the play of the poems more obscure. Moreover, contemporary readers nearly always encounter the riddles in modern editions and with modern English translations, and editors and translators often provide the riddles with clear divisions and interpretive notes. They sometimes offer their own solutions to the riddles (although the actual manuscript provides no explanation for them). All of which leads to a different and less playful experience for readers of the riddles. The author explores what it means to play the riddles in their original context, making the individual reader the riddle hero (hæleþ) whom the text calls on to construct playful worlds of imagination and language. He examines how the Old English riddles demand to be played and how they oscillate playfully between the mundane, the sacred, and the obscene.

A Gag at the Bottom of a Bowl? Perceptions of Playfulness in Archaic and Classical Greece.

Abstract: PERCEPTIONS OF PLAYFULNESS may mislead. Most of us generally think we can tell when someone we know well is playing around. Likewise, most of us generally think that when we are playing around, those who know us well will recognize our intent. Yet all of us have sometimes misperceived what we take to be playfulness in the people with whom we interact every day. All of us have construed a playfully intended comment as an insult or misunderstood an insult as a playful remark. In either case, we reacted to particular stimuli, somehow contextualized our impressions, and-eventually-made conscious determinations about intentions or behaviors as they pertain to playfulness.This process is complicated enough when it involves people we know or occurs in social situations with which we have firsthand experience. In such cases, personal acquaintance, familiar social contexts, and consensus about the lexical range of key words and nonverbal signals help foster shared perceptions of playfulness. On the other hand, cultural and linguistic differences, whether features of our own societies or others or of our contemporaries or of another time, reduce exponentially our ability to project playfulness effectually or to perceive intentional playfulness. We sometimes find it difficult to articulate our perceptions of playfulness or to recognize whether they are accurate. Ancient Greece provides a series of examples of the complexity of perceptions of play- fulness with respect to the ancients themselves-that is, how they seem to have projected and perceived whatever they took to be playfulness. By extension, these very same examples have the capacity to inform us, to make us more conscious of just what we take to be their playfulness and why we do so. Here, as happens so often, what we learn about the Greeks, we learn about ourselves.The Dipylon OinochoeSometime in the eighth century BCE someone-or perhaps more than one person-scratched a string of letters on an interesting but otherwise hardly remarkable oinochoē, a type of wine jug or pitcher. The recovery of the vase in 1871, most likely from a grave near the Dipylon gate in the Kerameikos area of Athens, caused an immediate sensation, primarily because the inscription it bore is probably our earliest example of Greek alphabetic writing. At the same time, it is certainly our first written dactylic hexameter, the epic meter of the Iliad and Odyssey, comprising a combination of five dactyls (a long syllable followed by two short syllables) or spondees (two long syllables) capped by a sixth unit of two syllables, the first of which is long, the second either long or short. For preliterate Greeks, these beats helped preserve in song the memory of the memorable. When Greeks began to write, dactylic hexameter continued to signal to readers, who probably read aloud, and to those who listened to them the importance of what they were hearing. The very form of the message on the Dipylon Oinochoē commanded attention. At the same time, the content of the inscription preserves the first known instance of a Greek interest in playfulness.1Translation obscures these three firsts, but especially the last: "Who now of all dancers most friskily frolics, his this. . . ." "His this" begins a second hexameter but after "this" (i.e., the vase) the inscription becomes what looks to be a nonsensical series of practice letters. "Dancers" is an unproblematic rendering of orchēston, a form of the Greek orchēstēs. The word paizei, with which the initial hexameter ends, often means "dance," but here is translated as "frolics" to distinguish it from orchēston. Though paizein may mean "to play" in general terms, orchēston makes it obvious that the inscription's paizei denotes dance.2 Furthermore, the shared root of pais, the Greek for "child," and paizein betray what to the Greek mind was the fundamental identity of behavior and emotions associated with dance, play- including playing like a child, engaging in some sports, jesting and joking, and playing a musical instrument-and children themselves. …