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When children begin to play games, it actually a stage in cognitive development and represents an increase in cognition. There are 5 stages of play development between the ages of 0 and 6 years, each of which requires a greater cognitive ability: solitary, spectator, parallel, associate, co-operative. pretend play (which usually begins between 12 through 18 Months) is particularly important because it is the precursor for theory of mind development (when a child understands that another person's thoughts are separate from her own). Even though children don't develop a  theory of mind until between their third and fifth birthdays, pretend play helps to begin to understand something about other's thoughts. For example, in order to play along when Mom pretends a banana is a phone, a child must have some idea that she is projecting the thought of a phone onto a banana. In addition to this psychologists have postulated that pretend play might be a tool that helps children realize that thoughts guide people's actions, language and emotions. This is also why pretend play is so important to children's social learning.

Co-operative play (the highest in complexity, beginning at around age 4 and especially age 5) , as Apocolipsis mentioned, is the highly structured play stage which encourages children to fall into different gender roles and play out roles they've observed in their own world.

So I totally agree that play is something we learned form a very young age as being crucial to our development in many ways. I could be argued that we couldn't have developed properly without it.. especially in the areas of social development.

But what is interesting is that in this part of our lives, we were learning to build stereotypes about social roles. We learned that mommy cooks in the kitchen and takes care of the children and daddy gets home from work. This is how most children go about pretend play. There is a social pressure from children around them too to play these roles "right." This contrasts with our pretend play as adults, as we've seen form the classroom exercises. People were able to play around freely with stereotypes and try to break them down throughout this class. maybe this signals an even more sophisticated stage in development, and it would be interesting to determine when this ability surfaces. Maybe in the teen years? maybe for some, never..