I found this quote from Neva Boyd on the site of the Eastern Cooperative Recreation School – www.ecrs.org.
Neva Boyd was “an educator who used recreation in social group work and group leadership. She was a founder of National Cooperative Recreation School,” and the Eastern Cooperative Recreation School a deep resource for anyone interested in games. This quote introduces a page of classic social games, and the site itself is rich in resources for anyone who is trying to help people play.
An experience begun as play may end as work, and vice versa; and enjoyment may increase with the change, whether it be from play to work or work to play. Enjoyment, consequently, is not the essential difference between work and play. The essential difference lies in this: that play is always an artificial situation and work is always a genuine one…..
A game, then, is an artificial situation set up imaginatively and defined by rules which together with the prescribed roles, is accepted by the players. Thus, when the child plays a game, he psychologically picks himself up and transplants himself from the genuine situation to the artificial or imagined one. He accepts the total situation of the game, including his own role in it: and as long as the game lasts, acts as consistently in the new situation as though it were genuine. He not only submits to the demands of the situation, but he cooperates in creating and upholding the situation…..
Like good drama, the game eliminates irrelevancies and brings events into close sequence in such concentrated and simplified form as to condense in both time and space the essence of a complex and long-drawn-out typical life experience.