Games and ideal playgrounds

Even though many sport philosophers have worked to delineate clear definitions of play and games, typical language usage often conflates the two phenomena and even provides an undue normative bias toward games as play. In this paper, I argue that a better understanding of games and ideal playgrounds is required to alleviate this normative bias. To carry out this argument, I first examine previous definitions of play and games and how the concepts are often conflated. Secondly, I provide a definition of ideal playgrounds using prior philosophy on play and human conventions. Third, I present an analysis that examines how both game and non-game activities can act as ideal playgrounds. Finally, I argue that changes to the way we use language can help to alleviate this problem.