Playfulness is a more important consideration than play. The
former is an attitude of mind; the latter is a passing outward
manifestation of this attitude. When things are treated simply
as vehicles of suggestion, what is suggested overrides the
thing. Hence the playful attitude is one of freedom. The person
is not bound to the physical traits of things, nor does he
care whether a thing really means (as we say) what he takes
it to represent. When the child plays horse with a broom and
cars with chairs, the fact that the broom does not really
represent a horse, or a chair a locomotive, is of no account.
In order, then, that playfulness may not terminate in arbitrary
fancifulness and in building up an imaginary world alongside
the world of actual things, it is necessary that the play
attitude should gradually pass into a work attitude.--JOHN
DEWEY, “How we Think.”
(2388)