Abstrakt
B. Sutton-Smith may be considered the most influential personality in the study of games. Concluding his The Games of New Zealand Children he proposed a categorization of schoolchildren games in terms of developmental criteria.
1) Choral games;
2) Central-person games;
3) Individual-skill games; and
4) Team games. He presented the theory of development of games played by New Zealand children throughout their school age. The theory is based on differentiating among configurations of social relations in the games in his collection of games. The paper presents an attempt to transform this substantive theory into a formal one, into a theory of configurations of social relations in schoolchildren games; with the use of empirical data in our collection of our schoolchildren games.