The Best and Most Complete Definition of Play I've Ever Heard

During a recent Q&A webinar with Parent Map, I was asked by host Laura Kastner to define play. Specifically, she wanted me to react to definitions that assert that play is purposeless activity.

Generally, when asked this question, I respond by comparing it to love: we can't agree on a definition, but we know it when we experience it. We can, of course, make guesses about the motivations of children when they, say, choose to build with blocks or create with paint. We surmise what might be spurring them to climb a tree or roll down a hill. We think we can perhaps understand why a child might dress up in a princess dress or wear a cape. But at the end of the day, the true motivations of others are beyond us. Play's defiance of definition is why the science on play is often so confusing and contradictory: every researcher seems to start with their own unique definition, which, naturally, produces unique results.

Yes, we might ask a child, "Why are you doing that?" and they might even interrupt what they are doing to respond to you, the adult, because they've learned that authority figures expect answers to their questions. They must stop playing in order to respond to our "testing question" with something like, "Because it's fun" or "I like it." Although in my experience most children reply with some version of "I don't know" or, even more commonly, a blank stare, before going back to their far more important endeavors. If you wait until they've finished playing to ask them "Why?" the moment has passed and the data is, therefore, deficient.

What we can do, however, is recall the motivations behind our own play. Granted, for many of us, that's something from the distant past, but when we consider our hobbies, we find echoes of the children's knee-jerk responses: we do it because it's fun and because we like it, but for me at least, there's something about gratification in there, satisfaction, thrill, novelty, accomplishment, mastery, and comfort. When I'm playing, I'm lost in the activity in a way that is illusive when it comes to my work-a-day life. Time stops when I play, at least until I look at a clock and realize that, in fact, it's been flying by.

I can say, from the perspective of my own play, that there is no purpose insofar as the evolutionary imperatives of food, clothing, and shelter. I'm not going to earn money through my play, no matter how insistent life coaches and career gurus might be that this is how to discover my "why" in life. Indeed, the moment money comes into question it tends, for me at least, to transform play into work. For several years I played around with book carving (here's a link), but then people started asking to buy them. I proudly sold several, but I soon realized that my motivation -- having fun -- was being supplanted by the utilitarian motivations of commerce.

From a purely evolutionary perspective, play is not only "purposeless," but also a useless drain on energies, a distraction from survival, and even, especially in the case of risky play, dangerous. So either play is simply a persistent byproduct of life itself, or it's so fundamental that evolutionary pressures have sustained it despite the obvious drawbacks. During the Victorian era the leading theory for the existence of play was that it was merely a product of excess energy, but knowing what we now know about the long arc of evolution, I think it's pretty safe to assume that it's central to the survival of our species. 

This isn't t say that while in the midst of play, any of us have a purpose beyond having fun, but from a wider perspective, play does have a purpose. And at least part of that purpose is to prepare for life itself. We may cringe at the gender stereotyping, but it's not an accident that our little girls play at being princesses because, whether we like it or not, the world in which they live values a specific kind of feminine beauty. It's no wonder that our little boys choose to play at being superheroes because, again whether we like it or not, the world in which they live values a specific kind of fierce masculinity. 

While play is how we prepare for the known, it also seems to have the purpose of preparing us for the fact that life itself is unpredictable. Much of what researchers see in animal play is, as play researchers Ruth Newberry, Marek Spinka, and Marc Belkoff put it, "training for the unexpected." A "major ancestral function of play," they write, "is to rehearse behavioral sequences in which animals lose full control of their locomotion, position, or sensory/spatial input and need to repair those faculties quickly." This, of course, provides us an evolutionary purpose for risky play, not to mention the well-known benefits of genuine childhood risk to the development of the pre-frontal cortex. These researchers likewise conclude that training for the unexpected is behind most social play as well. Fun may be the immediate motivation for play behaviors, but we've only scratched the surface when it comes to play's purpose.

Many researchers attempt to distinguish between exploration and play, saying that exploration is about gathering information about something, while play is discovering what one can do with it. As someone who has observed children at play for decades, I find this to be a difference without a distinction. The questions What is this? and What can I do with this? are almost always part-and-parcel. I'm thinking right now of a two-year-old who spent an afternoon putting our classroom hamster wheel through it's paces, rolling it, tossing it, banging it, wearing it, constructing with it, putting things into it, putting it into things . . . He was playing, but also exploring, and obviously behind it all were unarticulated questions. And this for me stands at the core of any attempt to define play: it's how we naturally go about asking and answering our own questions.

I've been writing here, mostly about play, for nearly 15 years. If asked, I might say that my purpose is to advocate for play-based learning or something, but the truth is that I would have given it up long ago if it wasn't, at some level, play. I don't do it to burn off excess energy (believe me, at my age that isn't a problem). I don't do it to earn money (I've never run ads or product endorsements or even joined an affiliate program). It takes a great deal of energy and occupies time that might be more practically spent doing something else. I might say I do it for fun, but that really doesn't cover it.

The real experts on play, of course, are the children themselves. Instead of asking children about their play, I often like to muse in their presence, saying, "I wonder what play is." This isn't a question that demands their attention, it is simply a statement of fact. Most of the time, if they deign to acknowledge it, they respond with something concrete, usually with what is closest at hand.

"Play is when I throw something."

"Play is when I'm working a puzzle."

"Play is when I run really fast. Watch me!"

One time, however, I caught a boy in a more meditative state, enjoying a sensory moment with some play dough. After several quiet minutes he replied, "Play is what I do when people aren't telling me what to do." To this day, that's the best and most complete definition I've ever heard.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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