Beyond Competition: Organizing Play Environments for Co-Operative and Individualistic Outcomes

Play, as Huizinga (1950) has pointed out, is a cross-cultural universal, expressing in an almost unlimited variety of ways the primal biological urge to move, explore, discover, risk, test, master, create and – of paramount importance – have fun. At its very roots, it is free, spontaneous and creative. In its more structural forms, it becomes games, dance and other art forms. At its most institutionalized rule-bound form, it is sport. Play, however, is justifiably an authentic end, a way of being, in and of itself.