Why We Need to Rethink ‘Play Value’
Over the past decade, the term play value has become shorthand for measuring the quality of a playground. It’s a simple, seductive concept. The more things a child can ‘do’, the greater the assumed value of the play experience.
But as play design has evolved, this numerical approach has begun to feel increasingly inadequate. Counting the number of activities on a play structure tells us nothing about how children play — how they move, imagine, collaborate or invent. It privileges quantity over quality and adult-defined outcomes over child-led discovery.
If our goal is to create spaces that nurture creativity, confidence and belonging, it’s time to re-examine what we really mean by ‘value’ in play.
The Limits of Counting Play
The notion of play value emerged from an understandable desire to create measurable benchmarks for design and procurement. It gave councils and schools a way to compare tenders and justify investment. Yet, by reducing play to an activity checklist — how many slides, climbers or spinners — we risk designing spaces that look impressive on paper but fall short in experience.
Structured activity counts inadvertently reinforce adult expectations of how play should happen: up the ladder, down the slide, move to the next feature. The child’s role becomes passive, consuming the design rather than co-creating it. This approach overlooks what developmental research has long shown: that play’s greatest value lies in its spontaneity, variability and freedom from prescription.
The Science of Unstructured, Child-Led Play
Child-led or unstructured play refers to play that is initiated, directed and sustained by children themselves, without rigid rules or adult intervention. It is the way humans have learned for millennia — through curiosity, imagination and self-directed experimentation.
The evidence supporting unstructured play is extensive and consistent:
- Cognitive and Emotional Development: The American Academy of Pediatrics emphasises that free play promotes healthy brain development and builds self-regulation, decision-making and resilience (Ginsburg, 2007).
- Creativity and Problem Solving: A systematic review of ‘risky outdoor play’ found that when children manage their own play, they show higher levels of creativity, social cooperation and adaptability (Brussoni et al., 2015).
- Mental Health and Wellbeing: Psychologist Peter Gray (2013) links the decline of free play in modern childhood to rising rates of anxiety and depression, arguing that unstructured play is essential for emotional balance.
- Flexible Thinking and Academic Readiness: Research by Whitebread et al. (2012) found that self-directed play strengthens executive function — the cognitive flexibility that underpins learning and problem-solving.
- Nature and Sensory Experience: A 2020 PLOS One review concluded that nature-based free play supports physical activity, creativity and emotional regulation across multiple studies and cultural contexts.
In short, unstructured play is not a luxury; it is a biological necessity for healthy development. It’s the way children test limits, negotiate risk and make sense of the world.
When Metrics Miss the Point
The danger in over-quantifying play is that it shifts focus from experience to efficiency. Procurement frameworks often reward suppliers who can demonstrate the highest activity count per dollar, unintentionally discouraging open-ended, continuous environments that are harder to measure but richer to inhabit.
This is not an argument against accountability or safety — those remain non-negotiable. Rather, it’s a call for balance. A playground with fewer defined activities but greater opportunities for imagination, collaboration and movement may, in reality, offer far more developmental value.
A child who turns a rope bridge into a pirate ship, or a mound into a mountain, is engaging in far deeper cognitive work than one following a linear course of predefined ‘play’.
As Lester and Russell (2008) observed in their influential report Play for a Change, children’s own play processes are the measure of quality, not the number of structures provided.
Designing for the Unknown
If unstructured play is the goal, design thinking must shift accordingly. The best play environments are not those that dictate activity, but those that invite possibility. Key principles emerging from research and practice include:
- Non-prescribed routes: Multiple entry and exit points enable children to self-select their challenge level, pace and path. This supports autonomy and inclusion.
- Continuous movement: Linked play systems allow fluid transition from one experience to another, supporting flow and reducing congestion.
- Open-ended materials: Timber, sand, water and natural textures encourage tactile exploration and reinterpretation.
- Risk as learning: Gradients of height, speed and texture let children practise risk assessment in safe conditions — a vital skill for resilience.
- Social affordances: Spaces should facilitate both solitude and interaction, supporting emotional regulation and peer learning.
- Nature and unpredictability: Loose parts, vegetation and changing light create the variability that sparks creativity and keeps play dynamic.
These are not new ideas. They echo decades of developmental psychology and landscape architecture theory. What’s new is the growing recognition that we need to defend these principles against the efficiency pressures of specification and cost-per-play metrics.
Rethinking Value
Perhaps ‘play value’ should be measured not by the number of features installed, but by the richness of the experiences those features afford. How many different narratives can a child invent here? How many routes of movement, degrees of risk, or opportunities for collaboration does the environment invite?
True value lies in what the space enables, not what it prescribes.
As researchers at the University of British Columbia note, outdoor, unstructured play provides diverse opportunities for decision-making that stimulate problem-solving and creativity (Cheng et al., 2023). In other words, the playground’s worth is found in its ambiguity — the freedom it offers for discovery, negotiation and transformation.
The Path Forward
If the past decade has been about counting, perhaps the next should be about trusting. Trusting children to lead their own play, trusting designers to prioritise openness over prescription, and trusting communities to recognise that the most meaningful moments in childhood are rarely quantifiable.
Playgrounds should not be designed to impress selection panels with a predefined checklist; they should be designed to empower imagination. The challenge before our industry is to redefine value in ways that honour the messy, marvellous, unstructured reality of play itself.
References
- Brussoni, M., Brunelle, S., Fleming, N. et al. (2015). What is the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 12(6), 6423–6454.
- Cheng, T., Brussoni, M., Han, C. et al. (2023). Perceived challenges of early childhood educators in promoting unstructured outdoor play: an ecological systems perspective. Early Years, 43(4),904-920.
- Ginsburg, K. R. (2007). The importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent–child bonds. Pediatrics, 119(1), 182–191.
- Gray, P. (2013). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of Play, 3(4), 443–463.
- Lester, S., & Russell, W. (2008). Play for a Change: Play, Policy and Practice: A Review of Contemporary Perspectives. National Children’s Bureau, London.
- Whitebread, D., Basilio, M., Kuvalja, M., & Verma, M. (2012). The Importance of Play: A Report on the Value of Children’s Play with a Series of Policy Recommendations. University of Cambridge.
- Dankiw, K., Tsiros, M., et al. (2020). The impact of unstructured nature play on health in early childhood development: A systematic review. PLOS One, 15(2): e0229006.
Dani Eastwood
Dani Eastwood is Head of Brand for Third Place Design. She works with councils, landscape architects and developers to create bold, bespoke play environments.
With 15+ years’ experience in business development, brand strategy and project delivery, she blends strategic thinking with a passion for nature-inspired, unstructured play—helping shape some of Australia’s most iconic adventure destinations.