neil mathis's List: Patterns of Play (Introduction of Play Article)

• Play in our species serves many valuable purposes. It is a means by which children develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities.
• It is a means of creating and preserving friendships. It also provides a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem solving, and all sorts of creative endeavors.
• The first point is that the characteristics of play all have to do with motivation and mental attitude, not with the overt form of the behavior.
• Play can blend with other motives and attitudes, in proportions ranging anywhere from 0% up to 100% percent play
• Pure play occurs more often in children than in adults. In adults, play is commonly blended with other motives, having to do with adult responsibilities.
• hat is why, in everyday conversation, we tend to talk about children “playing” and about adults bringing a “playful attitude” or “playful spirit” to their activities.
• The third point is that play is not neatly defined in terms of some single identifying characteristic.
• (1) Play is self-chosen and self-directed; (2) Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; (3) Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; (4) Play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and (5) Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind.
  
• Notice that all of the characteristics have to do with the motivation or attitude that the person brings to the activity.
• Play is, first and foremost, an expression of freedom. It is what one wants to do as opposed to what one is obliged to do.
• The joy of play is the ecstatic feeling of liberty. Play is not always accompanied by smiles and laughter, nor are smiles and laughter always signs of play; but play is always accompanied by a feeling of “Yes, this is what I want to do right now.”
• Players are free agents, not pawns in someone else’s game.
• To the degree that we engage in an activity purely to achieve some end, or goal, which is separate from the activity itself, that activity is not play.
• Play always has structure, and that structure derives from rules in the player’s mind.
• Play is freely chosen activity, but it is not freeform activity.
• The rules of play are the means
• A basic rule of constructive play, for example, is that you must work with the chosen medium in a manner aimed at producing or depicting some specific object or design.
• You don’t just pile up blocks randomly; you arrange them deliberately in accordance with your mental image of what you are trying to make.
• Even rough and tumble play (playful fighting and chasing), which may look wild from the outside, is constrained by rules.
• An always-present rule in play fighting, for example, is that you mimic some of the actions of real fighting, but you don’t really hurt the other person. You don’t hit with all your force (at least not if you are the stronger of the two); you don’t kick, bite, or scratch. Play fighting is much more controlled than real fighting; it is always an exercise in restraint.
• Among the most complex forms of play, in terms of rules, is what play researchers call sociodramatic play—the playful acting out of roles or scenes, as when children are playing “house,” or acting out a marriage, or pretending to be superheroes.
• The fundamental rule here is that you must abide by your and the other players’ shared understanding of the role that you are playing.
• If you are the pet dog in a game of “house,” you must walk around on all fours and bark rather than talk. If you are Wonder Woman, and you and your playmates believe that Wonder Woman never cries, then you refrain from crying, even when you fall down and hurt yourself.
• As actual sisters, they rarely thought about their sisterhood and had no consistent way of behaving toward one another. Sometimes they enjoyed one another, sometimes they argued, and sometimes they ignored one another.
• But, when they were playing sisters, they always behaved according to their shared stereotype of how sisters should behave. They dressed alike, talked alike, always loved one another, talked about the differences between themselves and everyone else, and so on. Much more self-control, mental effort, and rule following was involved in playing sisters than in being sisters.
• These are games, like checkers and baseball, with rules that are specified, verbally, in ways designed to minimize ambiguity in interpretation.
• The category of play with the most explicit rules is that called formal games
• Many formal games in our society are competitive, and one purpose of the formal rules is to make sure that the same restrictions apply equally to all competitors.
• Players of formal games, if they are true players, must adopt these rules as their own for the period of the game and be willing to stick to them.
• When not playing, children (and adults too) may act according to their immediate biological needs, emotions, and whims; but in play they must act in ways that they and their playmates deem appropriate to the game.
• Play draws and fascinates the player precisely because it is structured by rules that the player herself or himself has invented or accepted.
• Vygotsky's point, of course, is that the child's desire to play is so strong that it becomes a motivating force for learning self-control.
• The child resists impulses and temptations that would run counter to the rules because the child seeks the larger pleasure of remaining in the game.
• The child's real-life freedom is not restricted by the rules of the game, because the child can at any moment choose to leave the game. That is another reason why the freedom to quit is such a crucial aspect of the definition of play. Without that freedom, rules of play would be intolerable.

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  Play is simultaneously a source of relaxation and stimulation for the brain and body.