Towards a Semiotic Analysis of Toys

Nowadays academical interest towards games is endemic. Papers on “videogames”, “gamification”, “urban gaming”, “location based games” and similar are published by dozens; game studies are now considered a new discipline, discipline that, indeed, owes a lot to semiotics. Many other aspects of the human playful behavior, however, are neglected or ignored, and among them, toys are potentially an extremely fruitful object of analysis. Toys are a cultural universal, we found toys in pyramids and in prehistoric tombs and they are present in every country in the world. Toys, in addition, are linked to puppets, to animated films and, of course, to videogames; the main characters of successful films as Toy Story, Small Soldiers, Lego the Movie and many other are toys. A semiotic point of view on such a various and widespread phenomenon is strongly desirable. Approaching a semiotic analysis of toys, anyway, requires to take into con­sideration the (few) works on the topic pertaining to other disciplines. Psychology is probably the field that had more interest in toys: Donald Winnicott and Erick Erickson both dedicated important essays to them. Also Eugen Fink and his “Oasis of Happiness” bring a valid contribution to the study of toys and, of course, several ludologic theories can be fruitfully applied to toys. Caillois’ four form of play, for example,allow us to draw a typology of toys: toys oriented to alea (dices, coins) to agon (plastic swords, balls), to ilinix (trampolines, pogo sticks, swings, rocking horses) and to mimicry (figures, teddy bears, construction sets, hats, disguises). Bateson, on the other hand, underlines the importance of the material lightness of toys, that make them immedi­ately recognizable even to animals. Among the few semioticians who wrote about toys, Jurij Lotman is probably the one which contribution would be more useful. In his brief paper on “dolls in the system of culture” he focuses on the differences between stat­ues and dolls, on the role of fantasy in the use of toys, on the ability to create a “second world” of dolls and on their modeling ability. This extremely fraught work is undoubtedly an ideal basis upon which a complete and general semiotic theory of toys can be built. The aim of this presentation, thus, would be to provide an overview on the state of the art of toy studies and to propose a possible integration between different theories, oriented to the creation of a semiotic toolbox dedicated to this fundamental and too often forgotten aspect of human culture.