"Combining social semiotics with a design-oriented perspective on learning, this book shows how the toys and games produced by powerful global companies contribute to defining and changing the nature of childhood and to how children learn to understand and act in the world. Drawing on extensive research by the authors and their associates over more than two decades, it focuses on toys and games as resources for play, analysing their functionalities as well as their symbolic meaning potentials, and exemplifying how they are used in different contexts"--