Abstract
The distinction between toys and games is built into grammar itself: one plays games but plays with toys. Although some thinkers have recognized the importance of the distinction, their insights are often contradictory and vague, and the word toy is used unsystematically to refer to a wide range of objects and associated play-activities. To remedy this problem a phenomenological approach to play could be helpful, but those that exist rarely discuss the difference between forms of play, instead using playfulness as ambiguous shorthand for freedom from rules. Beginning with Charles Baudelaire’s 1853 essay, “The Philosophy of Toys,” the author surveys and synthesizes various theories of toys to produce a detailed account of those objects that conduce to toy-play, focusing on insignificance as the defining phenomenological quality of toys. He then uses speech act theory to offer a definition of a toy—an invitation to play with its identity—and explores how the existence of such an invitation depends not only on the intrinsic qualities of the object of play, but also its context and the identity of the player.
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Notes
One may, of course, play “with” many other things—the idea of going somewhere, for instance, or oneself. My argument is that in constructions where someone plays with something, the activity is more likely to resemble what I describe as toy-play than to resemble gameplay.
My understanding of toys as an intersection in time between subject, object, and context fits well with Gregory Bateson’s classic argument that play is not an activity but rather a frame (Bateson 1955). Unfortunately, exploring the connections between his account of my play and my account of toys is beyond the scope of what is being presented here.
Playing with a toy still falls within the larger context of a rule-governed world. I could say “You should not kill your friend with that toy,” because no object, toy or not, should be used for murder. The toy itself, however, does not contribute to that normative judgment.
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Levinovitz, A. Towards a Theory of Toys and Toy-Play. Hum Stud 40, 267–284 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9418-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-016-9418-0