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

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

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family."