“Something about the nature of play itself frustrates fixed meaning,” Professor Sutton-Smith wrote in 2008. “Just as some scholars spend their lives consumed by the metaphysics of literature or history or philosophy or theology — you name it — I came to spend mine in search of the metaphysics of play.”

Brian Sutton Smith was born, without a hyphen to his name, in Wellington, New Zealand, on July 15, 1924. His father, Ernest James Smith, was Wellington’s chief postmaster. Because there were several Brian Smiths in his neighborhood, Brian was known from an early age by his full name; as an adult he reinforced its solidity by adding the hyphen.

As a youth, he studied education at Wellington Teachers College. (Mindful even then of the human hunger for play, he chose the school because it gave pupils Wednesday afternoons off for sports.) He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Victoria University of Wellington, followed by a master’s in educational psychology there. In the late 1940s he taught at a primary school in a Wellington suburb.

Traveling to the United States as a Fulbright scholar in 1952, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked elsewhere with the psychologists Bruno Bettelheim and Fritz Redl. Returning home, he completed a 900-page dissertation on the play of New Zealand children and received a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of New Zealand in 1954.

In 1956, Professor Sutton-Smith moved permanently to the United States. He taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and Columbia University Teachers College before joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1977.

His years as a schoolteacher also gave rise to three novels for young people, written for his pupils and rooted in his own rough-and-tumble childhood. As he realized, few works of fiction reflected the experiences of New Zealand’s children, who were weaned on a literary diet of British imports, many with a lingering Victorian flavor.

In the late 1940s, when Professor Sutton-Smith’s novels first appeared in serialized form, they caused a furor among New Zealand parents, educators and public officials. At issue was their generous use of slang and vivid depictions of street life. (Children adored the books, published in full as “Our Street,” “Smitty Does a Bunk” and “The Cobbers.”)