In their recent essay ‘Heterophony and Hyper-Responsibility’, Åkerstrøm Anderson and Knudsen present a sociological approach to play that is worth recording: A Gregory Bateson suggests that play is a special form of communication in which the message is that ‘these actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote’ (2000: 180). When children play-fight, they continually draw up a distinction between play-fighting and fighting. Thereby, they establish that a marked strike signifies the strike but does not signify that which a strike would signify. Bateson’s final and more precise formulation is, ‘These actions in which we now engage do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote’ (2000: 180). Thus, play represents a distinct communicative doubling machine. Play doubles the world so that we have a world of play and a real world, and the doubling takes place on the side of the play. Dirk Baecker (1999: 103) formulates it in this way: ‘In play, socialness is constituted by ways of …