Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic
Constructions of Self and Other•
Sandra Chang-Kredl, Dan Mamlok,
and Vivek Venkatesh

The authors explore children’s symbolic play that involves themes of fear anddarkness, and they investigate the nature of children’s binary oppositions,particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-longqualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years ofage. They observed the children engage with play materials, including toys
and dolls, at home and on virtual sites such as Roblox. The play episodes they
analyze highlight children’s dyadic roles and scenarios and the pleasure of
their play involving themes of fear. The authors also address the media andcultural representations that provide roles and narratives for the children toextend this dark play. Key words: binary oppositions; cultural narratives;
dark play; self and other; symbolic play

Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) writes that adult esteem of children’s playdepends on its links to imagination, development, and progress, yet this notionof children’s play—and broader social beliefs about children’s innocence—tends
to exclude darker forms of play such as aggressive, destructive, rough, rude, orobscene play and nonsensical fantasies. Richard Schechner, an American theater
director and scholar in performance studies, originally coined the term “darkplay.” Schechner (1993) describes a type of performance or theatrical experience that explores intense and provocative themes and deals with taboo subjects, violence, and disturbing aspects of human nature. Schechner argues thatdark play affords the expression of desires, fears, and anxieties while pushing
the boundaries of conventional theater and challenging the audience’s comfort
levels and expectations.
Sutton-Smith (2008) discusses Richard Schechner’s dark play, comparing
it to what he himself called “cruel play” (Sutton-Smith 1997), and children’s play
behaviors that he described variously as illicit, disorderly, grotesque, subversive,and “intentionally contrary” (Sutton-Smith 2008, 93). He offers examples of this158
American Journal of Play, volume 15, number 2 © 2023 by The Strong
Contact Sandra Chang-Kredl at sandra.chang-kredl@concordia.ca

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

form of play in his research on the stories preschool and school-aged children
make up: “and then I was dead” (94), “the poop splatted” (95), “once there was
two babies and they hung from the ceiling naked” (95). As with Schechner’s
theatrical dark play, these young children’s representations “would strike theirparents or their teachers as offensive” (96). Yet, for Sutton-Smith, such formsof play carry a similar function as Schechner’s performances in increasing theplayer’s feelings of control and empowerment, as well as providing the childwith a private transcendence over the ordinary, hegemonic adult world througha “kind of courageous parody” (96).
Jayne Osgood, Mona Sakr, and Victoria de Rijke edited a special edition ofContemporary Issues in Early Childhood titled “Dark Play in Digital Landscapes”(2017) to address the experience of dark play in young children. Although theauthors and contributors did not refer to Schechner’s original use of the term,
they expanded on Sutton-Smith’s views of the darker sides of play to include
digital as well as nondigital spaces (Osgood, Sakr, and de Rijke 2017, 109). The
special issue contributors characterized children’s dark play as revolving aroundchildren’s interests in the frightening, “the spooky, and the dangerous” (Roselló
2017, 145). They wrote that children “often seek out risk and feelings of exhilaration in their play” (Procter and Hackett 2017, 214), and that dark play supports
the uniquely thrilling synergy experienced between fear and fun—“The fun is inalmost being caught, in nearly dying” (Roselló 2017, 154). Corroborating SuttonSmith’s work, these contributors noted that children’s dark pretend scenarios
carry experiences of intensity that, to the observing adult, may appear “troublingand disturbing” (Roselló 2017, 149) or “deeply upsetting for adults” (Osgood,
Sakr, and de Rijke 2017, 109). Jarod Roselló (2017) writes uncomfortably of his
own daughter’s attraction to dark and scary narratives and the excitement of thethreat and near escape in play.
Considering the function of dark play, Carolyn Bjartveit and E. Lisa Panayotidis (2017) envision this play as taking place in “a liminal space between
real and fantastical worlds where imaginations run wild and children can test
their emotions” (116). This liminal testing supports Sutton-Smith’s (2008) notionthat dark play can help children distinguish between their “own private pretending” (121) and the public, social world over which their private realities canoffer a transcendence. Educational philosopher Kieran Egan (n.d.) describes
the importance of children experiencing stories of “jealousy, fear, hate, cruelty,
selfishness” because these emotions are part of the human experience and, hewrites, shielding children from these darker instincts may “leave them with theguilty suspicion that they are the only ones who harbor wicked impulses” (5).

159

160

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

Anxiety and fear are unavoidable human attributes, and fantasy characters may
provide objects of focus for these anxieties, providing children with imaginative
elements to help them work through their fears in a safe context.
Given such research, in our view, dark play is an important experience foryoung children. Although close examinations of this form of play are still few,
one element that stood out in our observations of dark play was the children’s
use of dyadic constructions or binary oppositions. Binary oppositions referto a philosophical or linguistic framework that describes the system of two
opposing categories that define each other by their differences, that is, where
each element exists in relation to the other. The concept can be traced backto various scholars and fields of study, including most notably Ferdinand deSaussure, the Swiss linguist, who described the role of binary oppositions in
the organization of meaning in language (Fogarty 2005), and to Claude LéviStrauss, the French anthropologist and structuralist theorist, who posited in his
book Structuralist Anthropology (1958) that binary oppositions form the basisof cultural structures and symbolic systems. Put succinctly, “people understandthings relationally and comparatively” (Schalk 2011, 198) and signs “gain their
meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs” (Munawar
and Rafique 2016, 123). Dualisms organize our understanding of the world: lifeand death, good and bad, hot and cold, security and danger. As such, young
children learn about the world through oppositional categories that function
as structural frameworks in their everyday lives as well as in their stories (Egan
1986, n.d.), where characters take on dyadic roles and these structures become
incorporated into their own narratives.
One of the key dualisms in a child’s developing identity is the binary opposition between self and other, described as “one of the most basic theories ofhuman consciousness and identity” (Schalk 2011, 197). A contrasting entity
may be required when learning to define the self, that is, “the existence of another, a not-self, allows the possibility or recognition of a self ” (197). Jo Warin(2010, 2011) explores children’s developing sense of self in terms of their experiences with other people. Following five children from preschool to age seventeen
and focusing on their capacity and desire “for telling a story of self,” she concluded that “identity formation and group formation occur interdependently
as groups are created on the basis of beliefs about peers who are ‘like me’ andpeers who are ‘unlike me’” (2010, 61). In other words, the children’s conceptionsof self depended on “making social comparisons and building up a narrative ofself.” From these studies, Warin concluded that it was crucial that “all childrenDark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

have access to the resources for building up a story of self ” (2011, 2), including
resources from fictional narratives.
Mark Bracher (2006) refers to “identity-bearing scripts or narratives” (28)
as internalized perceptions that direct children’s narratives and behaviors, forexample, “the smart child” and “the loyal friend.” The association in play withcharacters “like me” and dissociation with those “unlike me” is part of a child’s
ongoing dualistic construction of self and other (Tajfel and Turner 1979) becausea child at play may position the idea of self through a “juxtaposition towards theother” (Jensen 2011, 64). The phenomenon of the “other” in play has therefore to
do with “the role of other as a reference and contrast point relative to sameness”(Miller 2008, 587), whereby sameness represents the in-group, “us” or the self,
and the other represents the out-group or “them” (Staszak 2008). While identifying “like me” and “unlike me” may be understood as an unsurprising, evenrequired, aspect of play development in children, it is also a phenomenon that
prepares children for broader societal and cultural structures. In the Westernworld, these are based on a similar binary construction. The literature suggeststhat educators and parents be mindful of the forms of the other in popular narratives that children receive and onto which children may extend their binaried
scripts. As Egan (n.d.) writes, “We do still have to worry about the particular
influences of the fantasy stories we choose, of course, but not that fantasy itself
is bad” (6). Generic forms of othering, based in the children’s tendencies toformulate the world in dyadic ways, may latch on to cultural representations
that extend these patterns of “good self ” and “bad other” onto more harmful
structures. For example, while the human-zombie or human-alien binaries may
be harmless in societal terms, binaries such as civilized-savage or familiar-exotic
characterize other human beings as subordinate or inferior (Jensen 2011). As
such, parents and educators should be aware of how the dichotomizing structure, so spontaneous and understandable in children’s play, may get tethered tomore harmful systems of us and them, self and other in our collective culture.
Finally, while children’s understanding of the world begins with binary
oppositions, they learn other “terms along the continuum between such opposites” (Egan n.d., 7). A simple example is that between hot and cold lies warm.
So, although fairy tales in Western cultural contexts may provide exaggerated
and unambiguous distinctions of good and bad characters, fantasy stories alsooffer children mediating categories. For example, between human and animals
there are talking rabbits; between life and death there are ghosts. Egan argues thatsuch intermediary groups may prepare children for philosophical and nuanced

161

162

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYways of thinking, as they consider what lies between consequential dualisms,
including self and other.
In this study, we observed children’s symbolic play with themes of fearand darkness, what we call dark play. Our purpose was to explore how children
characterize frightening elements in their pretend play—through dyadic constructions and attribution of roles and themes—by engaging seven children inhome play sessions over the course of one year with online play (e.g., Roblox),
and offline play (e.g., LEGO toys and dolls), depending on the children’s interests. Binaried elements of good and evil, life and death, and self and other—aswell as the tensions and ambiguities between these states—formed key elementsin the children’s observed dark play. We intended the study to respond to thequestion: How do children engage in dark play, and how are binary opposites
or dualisms expressed during this play?

Materials and Methods
The researchers conducted a close qualitative inquiry with seven individual children, four to ten years of age. The recruitment process included ads published incommunity centers and university bulletin boards. We recruited three of the participants based on previous acquaintances. We aimed to follow a maximum variation sampling in terms of gender and age (Patton 1990). The sample included
four girls and three boys, with a relatively equal representation for each age range(four to five; six to seven; eight to nine or ten). Although we aimed to recruit adiverse population, the children reflected a relatively homogenous sample, mostof the participants coming from similar middle-class backgrounds in a majority
English-speaking neighborhood in the Greater Montreal area. There were five
white children, one Asian child, and one biracial child. To gather data on thephenomenon of children’s dark play, we conducted naturalistic observation ofchildren’s play by acting as supportive play partners, interviewing them, andshadowing them (Vittadini et al. 2014). Each child was visited three to four times
over a period of one year. Each child’s individual play meeting lasted between
sixty to ninety minutes, depending on the child’s interest and engagement. By
visiting the children in their homes, we aimed to encourage and support their“spontaneous play in their everyday lives” (Jung 2017, 179).
Jo Warin (2010) focuses on the importance of a child’s “capacity for tellinga story of self ” (61) and “the social relationship between teller and told” (50).

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

Young children’s rich symbolic play depends on a degree of reciprocity andinteraction, especially with a care giver who “expands on the children’s ideas,
encourages communication, and assumes roles to help them elaborate” (Wieder
2017, 272). As the adult researchers, we aimed to provide this exchange andsupport for the children to explore and extend their play. We secured university
ethics approval, and authors Sandra Chang-Kredl and Dan Mamlok conducted
the play sessions with the children. We used pseudonyms to protect the participants’ identities.
As many twenty-first century play theorists have noted, children’s play inWestern cultures unfolds in both online and offline spaces (Marsh 2010; Jung
2017; Osgood, Sakr, and de Rijke 2017). Whether in-person or virtual, play takes
place in spaces that are outside ordinary life (Huizinga 1949), in which symbols
express elements of reality in “as-if ” conditions (Fromberg 1992). Some theorists
argue that this detachment from one’s immediate circumstances allows children
to experiment and express a range of emotions (Fein 1981). We observed thechildren in our study engaging with virtual sites such as Roblox and Sonic the
Hedgehog, and offline settings with, for instance, LEGO blocks, dolls, Disneyfigurines, and books, depending on their interests and following their leads.
In our study, we identified dark play sequences as those that involved
themes of fear and darkness, for a total of fourteen play episodes (see figure
1 for details). We characterized pretend play by the child’s utterances and play
behaviors in terms of play roles (including virtual personas), object transformations, storytelling, pretend enactment, and play themes (see Chang-Kredl
and Howe 2010). We determined themes of fear and darkness by the children’s
expressions of emotions of fear (Procter and Hackett 2017) and elements ofaggression, destruction, and domination (Sutton-Smith 1997). A pretend play
episode referred to a segment of play focused on one narrative theme, suchthat the episode started with the introduction of the theme (e.g., “a lion eating
the world”), was maintained through the child’s declarations or gestures (e.g.,
pretending to consume the objects in the room), and terminated once the child
ended or changed the play theme (e.g., child sees an audiobook and turns it on
to listen, which ends the theme of “eating the world”) (Nelson and Seidman
1984). At times, children included short moments of other play (e.g., during Eloise’s thirteen-minute online play episode in which the main theme was “getting
babies sick,” she on occasion made her character jump on a trampoline or buy
cookies at a bakery, while returning to the sustained theme of infecting babies).
We included the children’s conversations with the researchers in the play epi-

163

164

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYsodes when they elaborated on their play themes. The length of individual play
episodes isolated in our study ranged from four minutes to thirty-five minutes(see figure 1 for details). We transcribed these audio-recorded play episodes andcollected and organized visual data.
Analysis
We identified play sequences that involved themes of fear and darkness in the
fourteen play episodes. We analyzed each of the episodes using a narrative coding scheme adapted from Saldana (2016) that specifically focused on the elements of setting, character types (protagonist, antagonist), and characterizations(physical description, status, transformation), action or plot, elements of fearand darkness, conflict and resolution, and reflexive asides. We compared themes
to ensure validity.
Limitations
While dyadic formations were implicated in the children’s play episodes weobserved, we cannot generalize these findings given our small sample size. However, the research provides close descriptions of how the children’s spontaneous
play involves a drive to identify and assume dyadic roles and play with themesof self against an other. While one strength of this exploratory project is in its
focus on the children’s self-selected play in their home environments, future
research could take place in classroom or recess settings. Future research could
also include more directions with the materials and themes offered to children,
perhaps focusing entirely on video game play, or play with character figures,or on how toys dictate specific cultural narratives. Closer textual examinationof the dyadic cultural narratives that children draw from in their play may be
warranted as well.

Results
The fourteen play episodes varied, and they included, for instance, playing with a
Rapunzel LEGO set, completing a video game level, and drawing a scary character.
We consider the types of play observed in the examined episodes, the children’s dyadic constructions, play themes of defeating the other, and the combinedpresence of fear and pleasure in the children’s play narratives.

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

Episode
#

Child

1

EloiseChild’s Play setting, materials
Age
9.5

Online play: Roblox

Description
Killing zombies with tea

2Eloise9.5

Online play: Roblox

Kill-or-be-killed

3

Eloise9.5

Online play: Roblox

Getting babies sick4

Olivier

105Olivier

10

LEGO figures andblocksHomemade play sword

6

Elijah4

Living room with toys

Lego Me and Criminal
Lego Me
Sword fight, Percy
Jackson style
Eating the whole world7

Elijah4

Living room

8

Kody

7

9

Kody

7

10

Kody

7

11

Arielle4

12

Arielle4

Online play: Sonic the
Hedgehog
Online play: Sonic the
Hedgehog
Online play: Sonic the
Hedgehog
Pretend rocket ship,made up of a table witha folded mattress
LEGO Rapunzel set

13

Lilly

6

Bedroom, upper bunk

14

Victoria

10

Drawing materials

Length of play
episode inminutes
7 minutes, 14
seconds
19 minutes, 40
seconds
13 minutes, 17
seconds
14 minutes

4 minutes, 12seconds
35 minutes, 57
seconds
Dinosaurs and monsters
7 minutes, 40
seconds
Good guys and bad guys 7 minutes, 25
seconds
What makes Eggman bad 11 minutes
What makes Sonic good

5 minutes, 11seconds
Rocket ship and monsters 10 minutes, 40
seconds
Rapunzel with her fryingpan
The girl with the longhorns
Drawing a scarycharacter

19 minutes
6 minutes, 7
seconds
15 minutes, 54
seconds

Figure 1. Descriptions of children’s play episodes

Forms of PlayThe contexts of play, settings, and material varied depending on the children,
their homes, and the times at which we visited. For instance, Eloise played a
Roblox game online on the family laptop. Olivier played with a sizable set of
LEGO figures and blocks, then with homemade play swords. Elijah enacted playsequences with an assortment of toys in his family living room. Kody played
the Sonic the Hedgehog video game on a desktop computer. Arielle pretended
to ride a rocket ship with a table and folded mattress. Lilly dramatized Disneystories in her bedroom using costumes, and Victoria drew pictures of charactersthat frightened her.
Age and play materials seemed to affect the type of play in which the chil-

165

166

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYdren engaged, such as enactment, storytelling, and forms of nonplay including
discussions (Chang-Kredl and Howe 2010). The younger children, Arielle andElijah, both four years of age, engaged in extended play (nineteen and thirty-six
minutes, respectively) and repetitious enactments in which Arielle acted out
the scene of Rapunzel knocking down objects and “people” with a LEGO-sized
frying pan, especially the LEGO character she dubbed Flynn. This was often
preceded with a small whisper (“watch this,” “what? bah hah,” “do it again”)
and followed with hearty laughter. Elijah, in his living room surrounded comfortably with sofas and toys, enacted a prolonged sequence in which he was alion who ate the entire world, including people, friends, superheroes, and “thewhole planet earth.” The more he ate, the bigger and more powerful he became.
He peppered this cannibalistic play sequence with vocal sounds of “yummy
yummy” and pleasurable laughter. While power was certainly central to theseplay episodes, the tone was light and joyful. In the Roblox “horde defense” game,nine-year-old Eloise spent a good portion of the time enacting killing and hiding
episodes online. She acted out story events and simulated the characteristics ofthe character through voice, speech, and action, controlling the online action
through the laptop keyboard and trackpad.
Many of the children, including Lilly, Victoria, Olivier, and Kody, seemed
to enjoy conversing with the researchers about their play and perspectives. For
instance, Kody, seven, narrated his game play with Sonic the Hedgehog as heenacted “saving the world of Eggland turning into an Eggman Empire” through“never letting the evil Eggman control the world.” Moments of play could be
distinguished from discussions between the children and researchers, which
often took place during play episodes, through indicators of enjoyment (e.g.,laughter, the quality of “as if,” spontaneity, and symbolism). Video games have
many predetermined elements, and online action sequences necessitated immediate and continual responses, whereas play in a child’s room with toys tended
to call more for the initiation of ideas and narratives. For example, playing witha set of LEGO figures and blocks, Olivier, ten, spent much of the time setting
up characters and pieces, ascribing roles to figurines, and describing how his
characters developed through their associations with other characters and organizations, whether in a story he told of a plane crash involving criminals (“thishuge evil boss”) or a rocket trip to a distant planet.
Attributing Dyadic Roles in Dark Play
Symbols of personification were found in the roles that the children assumed

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

and attributed during their play episodes. Kody’s character play was based onvideo game personifications in Sonic the Hedgehog. Kody assumed the role of
the good guy: Super Sonic, leading a team that, as he explained, “always wins.”
Super Sonic is the superhero transformation of Sonic the Hedgehog. On screen,
he is a yellow, sprightly, animated hedgehog character with flame-like fur andoversized gloves and running shoes. Dr. Eggman is the game antagonist, portrayed as a human scientist who aims to dominate the world. He wears a circus
ringmaster’s blazer (red with white and yellow buckles), white gloves, black boots
and a classic villain’s moustache. Kody explains that Eggman is bad because he“tries to destroy Sonic” and wants to “make the world what he expects.” Kody
takes on the agency of the heroic character. According to Kody’s declarations,evil is someone who “wants to rule the world” and good is, interestingly, “thatI always get saved.”
Eloise, nine, also developed her role play in a video game, Roblox, although
she personalized her characters through game setting choices. In two of Eloise’s
play episodes on Roblox, the online avatar that she assembled to represent herself
was a female human-animal hybrid with fox ears, wolf tail, and long rainbowcolored hair. The character was armed with weapons, typically high-level firearms. She play acted as an innocent, happy girl and used this ingenue ploy tolure her enemies into drinking her tea, which, as only her character knew, waspoisonous. The antagonists that the game provided for Eloise’s play sequenceswere monsters, prototypes of frightening creatures from typical horror films andapocalyptic television programs in American popular culture, including ghosts,
demons, dark angels, and void slimes. These figures provide the exaggerated
external threat onto which a player identifies a malevolence to be overcome.
The facet of fear in the video game creates an urgency and thrill. In anotherplay sequence, Eloise adopted the avatar of a baby, again with hybrid humanand animal characteristics (foxtail). The baby was both protagonist (as main
character) and antagonist whose aim was to sicken other babies while adults
were somehow impervious to the illness Eloise dispensed.
Elijah, four, assumed an offline role that he himself described as “bad” andextraordinarily powerful. He embodied the omniscient character of a ravenous
lion, enacting the lion ingesting everything in sight including the kitchen, thehouse, people, and the “whole planet earth.” Elijah the lion is hungry, neversated, and unstoppable.
Elijah: [Roars forcefully]. Ha ha, ha ha [running all over the house].

167

168

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

Yammy yummy yammy yam. [Sounds of eating] [“Eats” thekitchen] I ate the whole fireplace.
Chang-Kredl: Is there anything that the lion cannot eat?
Elijah: No.
Chang-Kredl: Nothing? What’s the biggest thing the lion can eat?
Elijah: A whole house.
Chang-Kredl: Wouldn’t the lion get really big?
Elijah: Yeah, it would be so big that it would be even taller than agiant. And then it would be a giant, it would be so tall.
Chang-Kredl: Really?
Elijah: I am eating the whole house [eats]. I ate the upstairs now[going to the kitchen]. Hey guys, I just eaten the kitchen.
Mamlok: Why does the lion need to eat so much?
Elijah: It is so hungry.
Mamlok: But when the lion becomes so big, what is he going to do?
Elijah: He’s going to keep on eating.
Mamlok: He never gets full?
Elijah: He never stops.
Mamlok: Is he a good lion or a bad lion?
Elijah: Bad lion, because he eats everything. He even eats people.
Elijah assumes a raw and total power, consuming “everything that lies
outside the self ” (Loomba 1998, 144).
Olivier, ten, developed his offline characterizations of good and evil through
LEGO characters, sharing his construct of two characters he named “LEGO me”
and “criminal LEGO me.” The characters looked exactly the same except that thecriminal figure carried a gun. As the following transcribed play segment shows,Olivier ascribed the evil aspect in criminal LEGO me to that character’s social
association with a group of criminals, that is, a “criminal base.” Yet, Olivier did
not depict a clear us-and-them scenario, because he identified both characters,
good and bad, as “me.”Chang-Kredl: Which do you like being better?
Olivier: Lego Me. Has a sword.
Chang-Kredl: What’s the difference between Lego Me and Criminal
Lego Me?
Olivier: Criminal Lego Me is evil!

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

Chang-Kredl: What makes him evil?
Olivier: Um, he’s working for these criminals [points to airplanefull of figurines].
Chang-Kredl: I see, okay.
Olivier: They’ve got a huge criminal base and stolen vehicles
including this plane.
Chang-Kredl: Okay, . . . that’s the whole criminal sect right there[pointing to plane].
Olivier: Yeah.
Chang-Kredl: Alright, and what do they do?
Olivier: Uh, they have this huge evil boss...This is his base.
In the children’s play we observed, choosing a side appeared to be an
unproblematic decision. Sometimes it was a matter of identifying the bad guy
or monster and then assuming the other side. For instance, in Eloise’s online
Roblox play, the bad characters were easily distinguished through appearance
and behavior that reflected, as noted, popular horror genre representations inWestern cultures: demons and zombies lurking around corners and threatening
to murder the player through powerful means of attack (lasers, weapons, slime,
physical size). Eloise showed little hesitation in explaining which characters
were on her side (“everyone that are not creatures,” “all of the other humans”)
and which were on the other side (“creatures” and “zombies”).
Eloise: No don’t kill me, I’m just trying to kill you, okay. Just accept it.
Chang-Kredl: Are they all different forms of zombies?
Eloise: Yes, they are all different zombies. Like me and him andeveryone that are not creatures we are all on the same team that
try to kill all of the zombies. . . . Oh no, no no I’m gonna die,gonna die. High-ya! Ah no! Don’t kill me please. You are almost
dead, and you need to accept it because you are not going to kill
any of us. No, I finally dodged it. I must die. No, no you mustdie, not me. Not me and my teammates.
Chang-Kredl: You’ve got teammates; who are your teammates?
Eloise: All of the other humans. We are all on the same team.
Eloise went further in depersonalizing zombies with phrases such as “theyare not real players like us,” “they are made by a map.” As Elijah explains while

169

170

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYdiscussing monsters, they are unequivocally bad: “Monsters scare people, chase
them, cause trouble, and mess up rooms.” Eloise, however, did articulate nuancesin her appraisal of good and bad during one play situation in which she had
to shoot dark angels or be killed: “I feel bad because I want the angels to be on
my side, but we are killing the angels. I feel like we are the bad guys now.” Shefurther comments on how angels being bad “makes my life a lie.”
At times, the researchers introduced guiding questions during sessions.
Lilly, six, and Victoria, eleven, each responded to our question about monsters(“When you think about monsters, what are they like?”) by drawing and describing characters they would be frightened to encounter. Although Lilly did notrecall the name “Maleficent” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, she drew an image
with crayons of a figure wearing a long dress and cape while recounting, “Youknow, the girl with the long horns” and “big bowl on her head,” who has theability to make others her slave with “a tap on her head.”
Lilly: It is really scary. I just need to use my crayons. Here [draws]. . . long dress, a cape . . . it is really scares . . . see [shows Mamlok
her drawing]. I know the video is really scary. That’s her cape.
Mamlok: Ahh.
Lilly: Oh, that’s the way I feel, as if she is there. Do you want me toerase it?
Mamlok: I want to ask you what are you scared of.
Lilly: This! . . . Because look, she has horns. Oh my god—I forgot
something [fixes the drawing] she has a big bowl on her head,
and if she sees anybody, she taps on her head, and they become
her slave.
Mamlok: Oh dear.
Lilly: So, I am very scared of her.
Lilly had wide, fearful eyes as she drew this image, then she insisted on
erasing it: “I am going to erase it, so you will not be scared.” As with Eloise,
Lilly’s imaginings of a frightening character are influenced by popular, North
American media.
Prior to drawing the image described in the next sequence, Victoria sharedthat an inebriated man had sat next to her and her mother while they were riding
the city’s subway and that she felt frightened and uncomfortable. Victoria tried
to make sense of these feelings, explaining that it was not that this person did

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

anything to her or even talked to her or her mother; rather it was her feeling ofunease when encountering someone who seems strange or different. Victoria
proceeded to draw a picture of a creature that appeared to be inspired by popular
images of aliens.
Victoria: Okay, here.
Mamlok: Oh, wow! All right. So, this is a real alien, right?
Victoria: Yes. If I saw that, I would be scared.
Mamlok: You wouldn’t like to meet this guy in the metro.
Victoria: Nooo, I’d be very scared if I saw this in the metro. I’d bevery confused.
Mamlok: What makes this character scary?
Victoria: His, how his eyes are huge. Normal, bigger than normal
and there’s just black. And he’s green. And, I don’t know . . . hedoesn’t have human characteristics.
In both Victoria’s short description of her train encounter and her drawingof the alien figure, she seems to link her ideas of a frightening character to elements of strangeness (understandably, aggressive, disorderly, and uncontrolled
behaviors induced by alcohol consumption would be disturbing for some children) and difference (“doesn’t have human characteristics”).

Play Themes in Dark Play: Self versus Other
The main plot point of Eloise’s online Roblox play involved her defending herself
against enemy characters. As an illustration, in one sequence, Eloise ran from azombie, told it to leave her alone, then remembered that she created poisoned
tea and invited it to drink her tea. When she was near a zombie, she shot it withher M-16 sniper gun, adding dramatic remarks.
Eloise: Zombie, you are just too easy to get. Die, die, die, die, die.
Oh no, you are following me now. I don’t want to be, um . . .
don’t give me all of your attention. Don’t! Actually, do because I
have a tea party that is right now, happening right now, and ends
until you guys are all dead. How about you drink some of mytea. DRINK IT! Taste it! Taste it! Taste the bullet and swallow it

171

172

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYbecause you need to die! You need to die. DIIIIIIIIEEEEE. What
are you? It’s an ener-g-blah an enraged sand monster. Please die.
Please die.
The act of begging the monsters to die was quite remarkable to watch,because she was able to turn what appeared to be a frightening and threatening
scene into one in which she had created a sophisticated and ironic poisoned tea
party scenario to outmatch the might of the powerful demons, zombies, andsand monsters. In Eloise’s video play game, it was apparent that the enemy—in this case, a zombie—deserved to be annihilated because it was a clear andunambiguous threat. Monsters are the quintessential bad objects onto which an
externalized “threat to the integrity of the self ” can be effectively located andthen symbolically destroyed through play (Sibley 2009, 86), reinforcing a dyadic
sense of us and them.
The Roblox horde defense game is set up as a game of survival so that theplayers are being hunted by dangerous creatures and, to survive, they must takeon the role of killer, yet it is understood in the game mode that a player is a“good” killer. Killing and earning money are the only ways a player can survive
and reach higher levels. When Eloise pleaded with the other characters, “Don’t
kill me. I’m just trying to kill you,” she was engaged in a kill-or-be killed scenario in the online world. She seemed to rationalize with other characters (thebad creatures) that they should accept dying, rather than her and “all the otherhumans” dying.
We also saw this premise of kill or be killed, a war theme, in Olivier’s
description of outdoor and social pretend play, in which he and his friends usedtheir homemade play swords for a form of capture the flag in “Percy Jacksonstyle.” The rules of the game called for maiming or killing enemies by stabbing
them in the heart and cutting off their legs and hands. For play that involves
winning, this wartime equation of killing the other seemed straightforward.
Kody was clear that the good guys’ team, that is Sonic’s team, “always wins,” yetthe battle was difficult and required skills that developed through time spent on
incremental levels of computer play. Winning means that evil is defeated andwhat is required to win is being “that good” at the game. Such a play perspective
reflects Bruno Bettelheim’s (1977) discussion about fairy tale plots and how “thechild’s deep need for justice to prevail” is satisfied by seeing the hero rewarded
and the evil character punished (144). Indeed, Kody did not seem concernedwith questions that were not directly linked with winning or losing the game.

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and OtherFor example, when we asked Kody how he knew if someone was good or bad,his response referred to one’s gaming skills rather than to one’s values: “Well, if
they die so many times, or fail so many times, I know if they are bad or good.”
Namely, as Kody plays the game, the ideas of “good” and “bad” are contextualized into the actions of kill or be killed.
Whether on the side of good or evil, a state of power exists that is imaginedon both ends. As evil as Eggman the despot may have been for wanting to turnthe world of Eggland into his own empire, Kody seemed to internalize an equallevel of power and pleasure in feeling that he was only one of “a few [that] canmake it” and prevail against such tyranny, which made him, in turn, powerfully
special and more able than most. This identity clearly provided Kody with confidence as he noted that to succeed in this game you have to be “professional likeme.” Eloise explained the premise of the Roblox game with: “The more monsters
you kill, the more money you earn, the more weapons you can purchase.” And
she showed sophisticated knowledge about weaponry. Kody had tools that aided
with the player’s survival, including shields and invincibility devices.
Elijah’s role play as the insatiable lion and Eloise’s baby avatar that infects
other babies in the neighborhood signalled simulations of power. Elijah’s victims
and the babies in Eloise’s Roblox world were not threats, so the kill-or-be-killed
scenario did not become an assumption. In these cases, it seems that play withpower was the main interest. For Elijah, the joy seemed to lie simply in theexercise of vast power: “[Roars forcefully]. Ha ha, ha ha, [running all over thehouse]… I ate the whole fireplace.” In Eloise’s baby narrative, the power andpleasure were found in transferring her own unwelcomed responsibilities onto
other babies.
Chang-Kredl: Why do you want to make all the kids sick?
Eloise: Because then they have to do responsibilities for theirselves[sic] too.
Chang-Kredl: Oh, do they not want to do responsibilities?
Eloise: Probably not [laughs], which is why I am forcing them.
I’m a baby that forces everyone to do their own responsibility[laughs].
Pleasure or “Freaking Fun” in Dark Play
Pleasure is a characteristic of children’s play (Fein 1981), and the presence ofrobust laughter, such as in Elijah and Eloise’s episodes, distinguishes the chil-

173

174

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYdren’s play from their conversations with the researchers. We noted while observing Kody’s play with Sonic the Hedgehog that, to us, the soundtrack of the online
game was akin to a horror film and overwhelming. When we suggested to Kodythat Eggman’s comment—“The sun will fall upon you all. THE END”—maybe scary, Kody argued vehemently that “it’s not scary” and that “we are goingto save the world. I am going to go through all of these, and it is going to bekind of a freaking fun.” This insistence that the game was fun rather than scarysuggests that Kody experienced the play as a competitive game to be won andthat, in the context of the game, notions of good versus bad and the elementsof darkness as normative or moral categories were secondary to the goals of
winning and having fun.
Arielle role played Rapunzel with a LEGO set depicting a scene from theDisney animated film Tangled. Rapunzel, with her reputed long blond hair andpink gown, smacks Flynn, designated by Arielle to be the “ruffian,” with her
frying pan. This play episode exemplifies Arielle’s use of slapstick humor andplay as she repeatedly acted out the scene from Tangled during which Rapunzel
uses her iron frying pan to knock Flynn unconscious.
Eloise was gleeful, taunting, and effective in her role as a monster killer, andshe responded too with delight anytime she succeeded in making a baby sick.
Eloise: Wait, I’m going to make her sick. I made her sick! I madeher sick! [cheering] I made the baby sick. I am making everyone
sick [chuckling]. Okay, I am just going to keep doing this in theneighborhood until I finally get to the hospital [chuckles].
Thus, while Eloise developed sequences of video game play that are sadistic
in tone, she maintained a consistent and solid stance of enjoyment in her roleplay. She was able to embody a rather frightening character herself, albeit an
ironic one, demonstrating the synergy being experienced between fear and fun,the sometimes “troubling and disturbing” attraction to cruel themes (Roselló
2017, 149; Sutton-Smith 1982), and a fascination, even identification, with powerfully destructive characters (Sibley 2009).

Discussion
The as-if quality of play in these episodes of dark play provided a space for theDark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

children to experiment with powerful roles. The children were practicing narratives of self as the rescuer of the world, the omnipotent lion, and the powerfulprincess with her frying pan. The construction of narratives through play canbe understood as a means to transform everyday experiences and to negotiate
predispositions, desires, and challenges (Sutton-Smith 2008).
What we identified as the children’s dark play reflected Schechner’s (2002)
and Sutton-Smith’s description of intense, provocative, and sometimes disturbing
play themes: eating the whole world, killing dark angels, recounting the terrorof a scary villainess with horns. While we associate children’s everyday pretend
play—for example, animating teddy bears, playing teacher, making a toy plane“fly,” and feeding a virtual pet—with pretend objects, roles, and scenarios, thechildren in this study drew on cultural symbols found in “legends, fairy tales,and stories transmitted over generations” (Wieder 2017, 270) to fuel and animate
their play. The collective imagery of powerful figures, such as zombies, criminals,
the evil Eggman, Disney tropes of evil, and aliens, lent form to the children’s
often intense desires and emotions. These dark characters also provided purpose
and clear direction for whom they needed to be as the one who prevails overand defeats the enemy. According to Kelley (2008), “Tales available to children
in American society typically entail a battle between good and evil, with goodemerging as triumphant” (40). This perspective echoes Bettelheim’s (1977) discussion about fairy tale plots and how “the child’s deep need for justice to prevail”
is satisfied through seeing a hero rewarded and an evil character punished (144).
The children’s narrations and enactments of darkness were, for the most part,
instrumental in creating a sense of exhilaration as they transcended threat orassumed powerful roles, and it demonstrated a clear synergy between fear andfun (Roselló 2017), reflecting how “fear within stories is one of the gifts of fiction;it allows us to expand our experience vicariously” (Egan, n.d., 10).
The binary structure, argued to be necessary for the development of achild’s understanding of the world (Egan 1986, n.d.), was readily present in thechildren’s dark play narratives. In children’s understanding of themselves in theworld, the dyadic construction of differentiating between a sense of self andthe other proved a key element. The children seemed to experience this pull totake sides, as they created, enacted, and recalled narratives of good versus badand self versus other. They also showed a facility for assuming roles of powerful destruction (e.g., poisoning children, eating the entire universe) as well as
good (e.g., protecting a princess threatened by an evil witch). The dichotomizing
structures of self and other in the play we observed transpired within what we

175

176

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

would consider generic patterns, that is, within harmless binaries influenced bycultural representations of, for example, zombies versus humans and princesses
versus villainesses. It would be interesting to follow these children further into
their preteen and teen experiences to see whether—and how—their tendencies
to play with systems of us and them may later latch onto more harmful systemsof othering.
In terms of moving past binary oppositions, although Eloise engaged in themost outright sadistic forms of play, she also expressed the most overt openness
to entertaining a mediation or state of ambiguity between good and evil: “I feelbad because I want the angels to be on my side, but we are killing the angels.
I feel like we are the bad guys now” and this “makes my life a lie.” Olivier’slabeling of the other as criminal LEGO me provides support for Miller’s (2008)
description of how societies are dependent on the criminal label to provide the“establish[ed] moral order and stave off chaos” (589) within a justice system thatfunctions to maintain apparently clear-cut moral boundaries. But his labeling of
the character as criminal LEGO me showed his ability to accept ambiguity in hisrole. It may be that engaging in both the good and evil sides of play serves the
purpose of experimenting with ambiguity in a liminal space (Baudrillard 1981),
one in which children can experiment playfully with aggressive and destructive
fantasies and with characterizations of self and other that view good and bad asa continuum rather than distinct categories.
Rather than adults disallowing dark play because it makes them uncomfortable to see their children engaging in murderous, violent, or frightening
fantasies, it may be important to remember that fear and anxiety are sharedhuman attributes, ones that children can explore safely during dark play. Anxiety
is an uneasy feeling, “the tense anticipation of a threatening but vague event”(Rachman 1998, 2), whereas fear is linked to an identifiable object, which meansthat the threat itself is distinguishable and named: the witch, the robber, the badguy. Fantasy characters may help the child work through their fears (Egan n.d.)by providing objects onto which they can identify a source for the anxiety theyfeel. At the same time, the ability to realize how identities of self and other are
multilayered, complex, and based on various categories that can somehow contradict each other requires us to move beyond a simplistic, binary understanding of reality (Bracher 2006). Rather than reinforcing a continually solidifying
system of us and them, children’s dark play, like that we observed with Eloise
and Olivier, may offer parents and teachers insights into how children workthrough the complex gray areas between good and evil, between us and them.

Dark Play and Children’s Dyadic Constructions of Self and Other

References
Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et Simulation.
Bettelheim, Bruno. 1977. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales.
Bjartveit, Carolyn, and E. Lisa Panayotidis. 2017. “Transforming Early Childhood Educators’ Conceptions of ‘Dark Play’ and Popular Culture.” Contemporary Issues in
Early Childhood 18:114–26.
Bracher, Mark. 2006. Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation.
Chang-Kredl, Sandra, and Nina Howe. 2010. “Children’s Pretend Play with Media-BasedToys.” Play as Engagement and Communication. Play and Culture 10:82–99.
Egan, Kieran. 1986. Teaching as Story Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching andCurriculum in the Elementary School.
———. n.d. “Fantasy and Reality in Children’s Stories.” http://www.educ.sfu.ca/kegan/
FantasyReality.html.
Fein, Greta. 1981. “Pretend Play in Childhood: An Integrative Review.” Child Development 52:1095–118.
Fogarty, Sorcha. 2005. “Binary Oppositions.” The Literary Encyclopedia. https://www.
litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=122.
Fromberg, Doris. 1992. “A Review of Research on Play”. In The Early Childhood Curriculum: A Review of Current Research (2nd ed.), edited by C. Seefeldt, 42–84.
Geronimi, Clyde, dir. 1959. Sleeping Beauty. Motion picture.
Huizinga, Johan. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture.
Jensen, Sune Qvotrup. 2011. “Othering, Identity Formation, and Agency.” Qualitative
Studies 2:63–78.
Jung Huh, Youn. 2017. “Uncovering Young Children’s Transformative Digital Game Play		
through the Exploration of Three-Year-Old Children’s Cases.” Contemporary Issues
in Early Childhood 18:179–95.
Kelley, Jane, E. 2008. “Power Relationships in Rumpelstiltskin: A Textual Comparisonof a Tradition and a Reconstructed Fairy Tale.” Children’s Literature in Education
39:31–41.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B.
G. Schoepf.
Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism.
Marsh, Jackie. 2010. “Young Children’s Play in Online Virtual Worlds.” Journal of Early
Childhood Research 8:23–39.
Miller, J. Mitchell. 2008. “Otherness.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research
Methods, edited by Lisa M. Given, 587–88.
Munawar, Bushra, and Hina Rafique. 2016. “Structuralistic Analysis of the Poem ‘The
Stone Chat’ by Taufeeq Rafat” in Perspective of Binary Opposition. International
Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 5:122–26.
Nelson, Katherine, and Susan Seidman. 1984. “Playing with Scripts.” In Symbolic Play:The Development of Social Understanding, edited by Inge Bretherton, 45–72.

177

178

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

Osgood, Jayne, Mona Sakr, and Victoria de Rijke. 2017. “Dark Play in Digital Playscapes.”
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 18:109–13.
Patton, Michael Quinn. 1990. Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. 2nd ed.
Procter, Lisa, and Abigail Hackett. 2017. “Playing with Place in Early Childhood: An
Analysis of Dark Emotion and Materiality in Children’s Play.” Contemporary Issues
in Early Childhood 18:213–26.
Rachman, Stanley. 1998. Anxiety.
Roselló, Jarod. 2017. “I’m Not Afraid: Zombies, Video Games, and Life after Death.”
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 18:145–61.
Saldana, Johnny. 2016. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. 3rd edition.
Schalk, Sami. 2011. “Self, Other, and Other-Self: Going Beyond the Self/Other Binary
in Contemporary Consciousness.” Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 2:197–210.
Schechner Richard. 1993. The Future of Ritual.
Sibley, David. 2009. “Self-Other.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 85–88.
Staszak, Jean-Francois. 2009. “Other/Otherness.” In International Encyclopedia of Human		
Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 43-47.
Stromberg, Robert, dir. 2014. Maleficent. Motion picture.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play.
———. 2008. “Play Theory: A Personal Journey and New Thoughts.” American Journalof Play 1:80–123.
Tajfel, Henri, and Jean Turner. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict” in
The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin andStephen Worchel, 33–37.
Vittadini, Nicoletta, Andra Siibak, Irena Reifová, and Helena Bilandzic. 2014. “Generations and Media: The Social Construction of Generational Identity and Differences.” In Audience Transformations: Shifting Audience Positions in Late Modernity,
edited by Nico Carpentier, Kim Christian Schrøder, and Lawrie Hallett, 65–81.
Warin, Jo. 2010. Stories of Self: Tracking Children’s Identity and Wellbeing through the
School Years.
———. 2011. “Stories of Self: Tracking Children’s Identity and Wellbeing through theYears of School.” Education and Health 29(1): 19-20.
Wieder, Serena. 1996. “Climbing the ‘Symbolic Ladder’: Assessing Young Children’sSymbolic and Representational Capacities through Observation of Free Play Interaction.” In New Visions for the Developmental Assessment of Infants and YoungChildren, edited by Samuel J. Meisels and Emily Fenichel, 267–87.
———. 2017. “The Power of Symbolic Play in Emotional Development through the DIR
Lens.” Topics in Language Disorders 37:259–81.