The engagement of activities that presently defines play, essentially involves
- Free: in which playing is not obligatory, it would at once lose all its attractive and joyous quality as diversion
- Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance.
- Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative.
- Unproductive; creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game
- Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which alone count
- Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.
Cited from “The definition of Play and The classification of Games” Roger Caillois caillois.pdf
