instincts and capacities not immediately useful to the child. If they
were immediately useful, they would probably be put under the head of
work, not play. Many of the activities which seem playful to us and not
of immediate service do so because of the conditions of civilized life.
Were the infants living under primitive conditions, "in such a community
as a human settlement seems likely to have been twenty-five thousand
years ago, their restless examination of small objects would perhaps
seem as utilitarian as their fathers' hunting."[13] Certainly the
tendency of little children to chase a small object going away from
them, and to run from a large object approaching slowly, their tendency
to collect and hoard, their tendency to outdo another engaged in any
instinctive pursuit, would under primitive conditions have a distinct
utilitarian value, and yet all such tendencies are ranked as play when
manifested by the civilized child.

Other tendencies become playful rather than useful because of the
complexity of the environment and of the nervous system responding to
it. In actual life we don't find activity following a neatly arranged
situation--response system. On the contrary, a situation seldom
stimulates one response, and a response seldom occurs in the typical
form required by theory. It is this mingling of responses brought about
by varying elements in the situation that gives the playful effect. In a
less complex environment this complexity would be lessened. Also
experience, habit, tends to pin one type of response to a given
situation and the minor connections gradually become eliminated. For
example, if a boy of nine, alone in the woods, was approached by another
with threatening gestures and scowls, the fighting response would be
called out, and we would not call it play, because it served as
protection. If the same boy in his own garden, with a group of
companions, was approached by another with scowls, a perfectly
good-natured tussle might take place and we would call it play. The
difference between the two would be in minor elements of the situation.
Some of these differences are absence or presence of companions, the
strangeness or familiarity of the surroundings, the suddenness of the
appearance of the other boy, and so on.

Most of the older theories of play did not take into account these three
facts, _i.e.,_ the identity in original nature of the roots of play and
work; the fact that man's original