Frankly, I was in shock when I suddenly received so much new information on play when I received the editor's proofs for the Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society. For example, there are approximately 450 articles written by 130 authors from 22 countries. I had the excited feeling that the whole story of play that has baffled us all for so long might be finally solved.

The encyclopedia articles in alphabetical order begin with Volume 1 “Academic Learning and Play” and end with Volume 2 “Ziginette,” which is a gambling card game. Clearly it was going to be hard to find anything missing in such a cauldron of multiplicitous ambiguity. But more importantly, it looks as if these volumes might now bring an ending to the old-fashioned view that play is not really very important. That is, we say conventionally that play might be fun but unlike religion, the arts, science, and politics, it is not really very serious for the human condition or even worthwhile for academic studies.

Against this, I have been telling myself that, on the contrary, play is important because it heralds the beginning of civilization by imposing routines, rituals, and rules upon the expression of the universal primary and relentless adaptive emotions (loneliness, anger, fear, shock, disgust, and apathy). These emotions are basic in their raw character within the evolutionary struggles for survival.

For example, without play you might have murder—with play, you have multiple, unique forms of bonding within which the violence is expressed within the rules. Imagine my excitement on reading on page 484 the article “Play Among Animals,” in which the author discusses various signals that animals make in pursuit of a morality that bonds them together, rather than driving them apart. And then, in an article on page 489 “Play and Evolution,” the author says: “it is sobering to realize that since both vertebrate and invertebrate animals engage to some extent in play, the potential for play goes back as far as 1.2 billion years.”

Given the increasing number of toy museums around the world (including the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York), the development of university degrees (such as in the United Kingdom), and with play as a major topic for those who will be in charge of child play in the streets, we are perhaps beginning to give the topic of play the seriousness of a major cultural form that it deserves, which is testified to so remarkably by these two volumes.