Play Frames

Gregory Bateson (1904–80), the British ethologist-anthropologist, introduced the notion of a play frame in “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” first published in a conference report in 1955, but not gaining a wide readership until its inclusion in a collection of his works, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, in 1972. In a series of propositions, Bateson lays out a theory of play as a form of paradoxical communication, the emergence of which harkened a new stage in the evolutionary process, particularly for mammals. The fundamental features of play, moreover, are unique neither to humans or to what is regularly ...