In this article, I advance three points, each in service of “extending play” as a critical conceptual category. The article begins with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Deep Play,” tracing through its lens the possibilities for “deeply extending play.” The essay extends Geertz’s argument that games and play are in/as/of/through culture. Games and play are not generative of, reflective of, just culture. Rather they are intensely interwoven. I argue that games and play, as conceptual categories, need to be viewed as “experimental systems,” and those concepts deserve to be informed by alternative perspectives. Finally, the article returns to the notion of “meaningful play” as mechanism of sense making and cultural negotiations with structures. Meaningful play lies at the core of exploration and encourages a different kind of reading of play(ful) spaces. Meaningful play is part of what makes games and play so fundamentally an aspect of the human (and nonhuman) condition.
