My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.

Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.

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 have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.

With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.