Abstract

Over twenty years ago, Riesman exhorted social scientists to “pay more attention to play, to study blockages in play in the way that they have studied blockages in work and sexuality.” Since that time, there has been increased concern with leisure. But leisure and play, despite some ambiguity in the use of these terms, are not identical. Play is a context, a set of principles for organizing experience, constituted by any activity that is voluntary and open-ended (i.e., free from both external and internal compulsions), non-instrumental (in the sense that it is pursued for its sake and has at its center of interest process rather than goal), and transcendent of ordinary states of being and consciousness.