The Nature of Play in Le avventure di Pinocchio

Based on ecocritical theory, theories about ‘The Strange Child’, and theories about play and criteria of play as found in Peter Smith’s Children and Play (2009), this article aims to examine the nature of play in various illustrations of Pinocchio’s sojourn in The Land of Toys. The article also discusses the representations of play in light of the ambiguous message in the book about the necessity of freedom and, at the same time, the necessity of formation. Since physically active play seems to be the most common kind of game in The Land of Toys, the text, but not always the illustrations, seems to perceive physically active play as a hindrance to the formation process where a physical, controlled, and subordinated body is a basic condition.

The play world of children with autism is based on a fixed formula of their behaviour. They do not participate willingly in games taken up spontaneously and any attempts to initiate them or join games voluntarily are not always successful. They wish to participate in social contacts like every child, they have motivation towards it but they lack the appropriate knowledge and skills in how to get involved in them normally (Pisula, 2005, p. 103; see Njardvik, Matson & Cherry, 1999, pp. 287-295). The effective method that supports problem solving and enables children to learn social skills, including play skills, is the usage of Comic Strip Conversations, which arranges in a systematic way “what people say and do, and emphasize what people may be thinking” (Gray, 1994, p. 1).

Present-day research in the field of special education concentrates on these aspects of supporting the development, education, and rehabilitation of the disabled which - for years - were underestimated or unnoticed. One of the aspects is the therapy of persons with multiple disabilities, including the deaf-blind. In the main part of the article we draw the reader's attention to the opportunities of using subject plays in professional work with children who have simultaneous hearing and eye-sight impairment. We present various definitions of the term "play", classify subject plays, and show the phases of introducing subject plays in the process of education and rehabilitation of a deafblind child. We also pay attention to the functions of subject plays in the context of the development of communication, cognitive activity, and creative activity of children with simultaneous hearing and eyesight impairment as well as to the role of subject plays in the sphere of enriching the children's knowledge of different objects, natural history, and social roles.

The evolution of game play. Subordination of spontaneity to arbitrary conventions

Among the many issues that are raised in the context of the development of preschool children, among others, there is the one devoted to the issue of play and games. However, the need to play does not cease with the end of the developmental stage that is childhood. Playing as a natural need of the species homo sapiens, along with cognitive activity (the need to learn) and social activity, are considered elementary forms of human activity also in adulthood and old age. In considering the evolution of playfulness in games, the fact of the identity of the concepts of “fun” and “play” and the possible differences in the meanings of these two concepts were emphasized. The vividness of play may be subject to discipline. The existence of a large body of literature on play (children’s, adult) sometimes relegates the analysis of the process of evolution of play activity into play (cycle: play-game). Certain categories of fun and games are very clearly arranged in a temporal sequence related to their appearance and the transition of one into another (fun into games). This issue is not one of the well-studied, but some outline of this thought can already be described.