THE MEANING OF UTTERLY FREE

2 How Play is Identified in Nonhuman Animalsįive Most Agreed-Upon Characteristics of Human Play.

1.5 Play is conducted in an alert, active, but relatively non-stressed frame of mind.

1.3 Play is guided by mental rules, but the rules leave room for creativity.

1.2 Play is intrinsically motivated-means are more valued than ends.

1.1 Play Is Self-Chosen and Self-Directed.

1 Five Most Agreed-Upon Characteristics of Human Play.

THE MEANING OF UTTERLY FREE

In an often-referred-to article on play in the Handbook of Child Psychology, Kenneth Rubin and his colleagues (1983) characterized play as behavior that is (a) intrinsically motivated (b) focused on means rather than ends (c) distinct from exploratory behavior (d) nonliteral (involves pretense), (e) free from externally imposed rules and (f) actively (not just passively) engaged in by the players.Īfter analyzing these and other attempts to define play, Peter Gray (2009, 2013) concluded that essentially all of the descriptors of human play used by prominent play scholars can be boiled down to the five described below.In his influential essay, The Role of Play in Development, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) characterized children’s play as activity that is (a) “desired” by the child, (b) “always involves an imaginary situation,” and (c) “always involves rules” (which are in the minds of the players and may or may not be laid down in advance).It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.' It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. In his classic book Homo Ludens, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1955) summed up his elaborate definition of play as follows: 'Play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.Three famous examples of attempts to characterize play are the following:

Play is not neatly defined in terms of any single characteristic instead, it involves a constellation of characteristics, which have to do with the motives or mental framework underlying the observed behavior. Peter Gray, Boston College, Boston, MA, USA

The meaning of utterly