Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.

We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.

The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.

If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."

I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.