Thought-provoking article by Alfie Kohn on the value of play, both in intrinsic terms and in terms of motivation. His focus is mainly on children in educational systems, but a lot of the lessons and some of the article apply to adults and broader contexts too, including the relationship between play and work.

Interesting to think about how this is related to concepts of games, leisure and entertainment, all (some?) of which might be seen as having elements of play, though 'play' is definitely something more than that, and the overlap is far from complete even where the concepts do intersect. Is movie-watching a form of play? I'm not sure at all. References Huizinga, Csikszentmihalyi, Dewey and others that are worth reading.