The Many Meanings of Play—Introduction

THE ATTEMPT TO DEFINE PLAY LEADS EITHER TO A CONCEPT SO broad that the borders between other mental and physical acts disappear, or to one so narrow that its usefulness is limited. Thus it may be of help to postpone the answer to the question, "What is play?" and to explore instead the role of play as we see it when we observe and analyze children.

There are, as has been pointed out, two interlocking components, a mental act and a conscious or unconscious fantasy and wishes, and a physical act which carries these into an observable enactment. These two components alone would not allow us to differentiate play from work. In games and in work, an idea or an attempt to fulfill a wish is also carried into physical achievements. Play therefore must have an additional quality which we might refer to as "trying on," an exploration, an attempt to resolve a problem in order to achieve a new level of competence or developmental organization. At closer inspection, even this characteristic insufficiently differentiates it from work. The carpenter, the artist, or the inventor may be hard at work to "try on" new solutions and to experiment in action and thought. Thus it is essential to stress what seems to be self-evident—that the necessary additional characteristic of play is the awareness that what is enacted is not real. The act is accomplished on a level of symbolic meaning; however close at times it may be to reality, it is after all "play." We assume that the child knows that the teddy