Kitten and String

We are trying to change the way that you think about play.

You almost certainly think about play the way that the culture thinks about it, as if it is practice, training. The toy industry and most of the philosophers and the therapists have taken this essential aspect of play and made it seem like its the only thing.

But it isn't.

And in the case of disabled play it is particularly obvious that much of what the culture expects from play is inappropriate. Many disabled people do not use play as a means of practicing to become builders or nurses or vets or whatever. Very few of the products we sell fill that niche either.

And despite claiming to believe in the power of play we are guilty of this as attitude much as any. Our approach has been to borrow the language of the therapists, the people who did the work and coined the terms and figured out what was going on... what was the point of play?

According to Roland Barthes, even in 1957 every toy had to "mean something", and that was long before the rise of licensing.

Well we have decided to change the way that we think about play. Someone needs to look again at what play is, rather than what it is for.

We describe it as wet play rather than dry play. Dry play is about competing, practicing and performing,

Wet play is about immersion in the senses, pleasure and craft.

Wet play is about the moment, and it is difficult to write about, the language skips over it, we have "fun" and we have "sensory", but these words don't really do very much, so we are going to have to coin our own phrases in order to be able to talk about play. I hope you will join us.

So this is a competition, we want you to write a 100 word essay about a kitten and a ball of string, from the point of view of the kitten. We don't want the mother cat and her thoughts about mice and hunting, we want you to lose yourself in the string please.

Winners will be published here and rewarded.