The book opens with the author telling us that play has long been regarded as a kind of bucket in which to dump phenomena which are otherwise inexplicable or apparently meaningless. This created in me the false expectation that Susanna Millar would against this advance some theory or explanation of play, but no, she runs with the idea of play as a bucket of inexplicable practises. This immediately drags us deeper into Absurdistan than we might care to go without Cervantes or Larry Sterne. If an activity serves a practical purpose then it can't be play, if it appears to be inexplicable then it must be play. Play in this book is mostly that which can't be explained by any other category of behaviour in 1968. Mostly because a certain degree of educational or learning activity, for animals two and four legged, creeps in to so many activities.
Since 1968, the year this book was first published, a certain amount of thinking and redefinition has occurred so for examples patterns of repetitive behaviour of animals incarcerated in zoos such as pacing backwards and forwards within the enclosure is here regarded as an example of play while I believe it is currently assumed to be a reaction to the stress of imprisonment. Of Piaget, still the dominant voice in her work, charmingly she relates that studies of play for him and herself began by observing their own children, if small children are little scientists, discovering the world through repeated experiment, the habit it appears can rub off on to their parents.
Play is always in a dialectic relationship with the environment, the poorer and less stimulating the environment the poorer the play, whether pigs or people are under consideration, so in a two year observational study the only examples of play recorded in an East African village were a boy making a plough to which he yoked his younger brother (not something which sounds playful for the younger brother, but perhaps after two years the researchers were getting desperate) and another child who made a house out of reeds.
However despite this the text is generally a cheerful read because consideration of play like watching creatures play or animals eat is inherently pleasing.
This is though also a dated book in that the author gives space to discussing Freud and post Freud Sunni- Shia style divisions between his successors before dismissing them all as irrelevant.
Interestingly there is a chapter on play therapy from which it is clear that the author has conducted some successful play therapy yet ultimately she is unsure if or why it might work.
Perhaps the best way to describe this book is that it is like being led round an unfamiliar house only by the light of a single candle which at a certain point goes out. Mildly enjoyable but unilluminating.