 Pretend play is essentially dramatic. The banal is transformed into the fantastical. A puddle becomes an ocean, a stick becomes a sword. The improvisation of scenarios can be derived either from children's real experiences or from fantasy themes or both. Make Believe Play includes games such as families, schools or doctors in which children enact daily routines. These can be transgressive too, featuring children who are perpetually naughty because they run away and get into mischief and, for instance, in mums and dads and babies, children who cry a lot. Rather differently, pretend play includes phantasmagoric narratives in which characters such as zombies, witches and fairies scream, chase, cast spells, catch and kill. Fixed play equipment and physical aspects of the playground and grass area, if there is one, may be incorporated into pretend play, becoming, for example, a jail or the rigging of a ship, a doorway behind which to hide or an animal's den. Pretend play is found among children of all ages at primary school. As they get older, it may become more subversive. It will draw on a wider range of media experiences. It will express more aspirations to adult roles and it may feature emerging leaders more markedly. The media have an important role to play here too, providing raw material for a wide range of narratives from movies, video games and TV. While it may seem, as with their performances of song and dance routines, that they're simply copying these sources, this is rarely the case. Instead, they transform, recombine and subvert in often surprising ways. Some make-believe games draw specifically on children's experience of computer games, something that's been noted by researchers for at least 10 years. Some examples we found are children adapting stumps in the playground as magic consoles, waving imaginary game weapons, such as lightsabers and playing mimed versions of first-person shooters. Though computer games are sometimes blamed for a perceived decline in children's outdoor play, these examples show how imaginative games in the playground can build on them. Why do children like make-believe play? They often say it's because they don't have to follow particular rules and they can make up anything, inventing their own events, characters and actions. It also gives them a chance to enjoy and display their shared knowledge of fantasy scenarios from film, television, computer games, comics and fairy tales. Children, like adults, get respect and admiration for cultural knowledge.