Playthings and Playtimes
Play, affect and material culture in the ludic world
Hannah Field (Editor), Seth Giddings (Editor), Ben Highmore (Editor)
In 2024 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs exhibited films of children from across the world playing with sticks, hoops, marbles and other toys. The implication was clear: play feels and looks like a universal language but takes on specific local forms. Using this as a starting point, Playthings and Playtimes explores the conflict and contradictions that circulate when play is simultaneously recognized as a species attribute (part of human nature) and as something crucially differentiated across time and space by design, technology, sentiment, pedagogic values and so on. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this interplay between the fixed and the mutable. Topics range from the elaborate miniature worlds made by H. G. Wells and his sons to digitized fidget spinners, from avant-garde Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s wooden blocks to the playground spaces of Kuwait, and from the much-maligned plastic toy to the new museum Young V&A. Together, they bring play and the world of feelings into sustained contact with the history of material culture and design, psychoanalysis, childhood studies and other disciplines concerned with play culture. In the process, Playthings and Playtimes investigates key elements of a humanities approach to the modern world through the prism of play’s affective materiality.
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Seth Giddings
2 The state of play: an extended review of play theory
Hannah Field and Ben Highmore
Part I: Spaces
3 Miniaturization and ‘adulteration’: from H. G. Wells to Mike Kelley via psychoanalysis
David Hopkins
4 The curious place of the child in the city: the shifting politics of play in three playground objects
Jon Winder
5 Children first: Kuwait’s Kindergarten Community Units
Wadha Almutawa
6 The apparatus of post-digital play: playgrounds, games and building blocks
Seth Giddings, Sara M. Grimes and Darshana Jayemanne
Part II: Things
7 Playful deception: how children’s magazines turned youth into magicians between 1850 and 1950
Eva Van de Wiele
8 Gaming life from 1790 to the 2000s: moving pieces through fraught pasts into imagined futures
Megan A. Norcia
9 Constructive play, avant-garde art and the utopian imagination in Latin America
Jordana Blejmar and Erika Teichert
10 In defence of the plastic toy
Meredith A. Bak
11 Fidget toy simulation apps and children’s post-digital sensory play
Bjørn Nansen, Jessica Balanzategui and Luella Nansen
Part III: Conversations
12 Grounds for play: a conversation about playgrounds
Wendy Hoddinott with Ben Highmore
13 Playing in the museum: the making of Young V&A
Katy Canales and Holly Tatham with Hannah Field and Ben Highmore
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800089624
Publication date: 29 October 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800089624
EPUB ISBN: 9781800089631
Hardback ISBN: 9781800089600
Paperback ISBN: 9781800089617
Hannah Field (Editor) 
Hannah Field is Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Sussex.
Seth Giddings (Editor)
Seth Giddings is Professor of Ludic Technologies at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
Ben Highmore (Editor)
Ben Highmore is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex.
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