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

When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn't mean that you get what you want.

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?

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.