Fun isn’t easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” vs. “playing to win”

Abstract

Play appears in many cultures and species, but its purpose remains mysterious. Here, we investigate children’s goals during play, which may help to illuminate play’s function. In two preregistered experiments, we presented 5-to-10-year-old children (n = 124) with a novel game, and directly compared their judgments about how to best configure the game when playing for fun (“have as much fun as you can”) or trying to win (“knock down all the blocks to win stickers”). We found that for task-relevant factors, children chose more difficult settings when playing for fun than when trying to win. For task-irrelevant factors, children generally preferred settings that demanded flexible behavior, such as high randomness and novelty. These results suggest that children approach play as an opportunity for gaining internal and intrinsic rewards, rather than externally-defined rewards. We discuss several hypotheses about the nature of these internal rewards.