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If we go back to the dictionary definitions, as well as to the usage of the word in ordinary conversation, play seems, in the first instance, to connote freedom from restraint. ‘Free play’ is a redundancy.
What restraints is it free from? For the individual, as a first approximation, play is designed to be free from the demands of the external world as well as the distressing and punitive forces of the inner world. The pleasure that it gives, in this respect, derives from its abrogation of these demands and the consequent relief from stress, and from its facilitation of function pleasure, of illusory and real gratifications of needs ordinarily suppressed, and the promotion of self-worth.
By way of circumscribing its meaning, it might be said that play is not the negative or opposite of work; indeed it may involve hard work as, for example, in recreational mountain climbing. (We may add parenthetically that defining work is as difficult as defining play.) Nor is play the sole source of pleasure, since much work that is not play provides pleasure, as do other activities such as social events that are neither all work nor all play. Illusion facilitates and is facilitated by play, but it is not identical with it.
As it works out, play is not always nor entirely free from restraint. Rules are needed to make the game interesting, to establish that there is a winner and a loser, and to keep it from intruding hurtfully upon the outer and inner world, and from being intruded upon by them. In play we may or may not depart from most conventions of daily life, such as logical thought, speech and the conventions of our conduct with others. That is, play is not a complete abandonment of conventional reality, but rather a partial and limited abandonment.
In my opinion, perhaps the most characteristic, if not essential, property of play is that it is designed to have no lasting consequence outside its sphere defined in place and time. When the play ends everything is to be as it was. T