Well, I have to take a somewhat contrarian view here and say adults in this day and age play more than adults have ever played. I will concede that the “play” is not necessarily “imaginative”...no, adults don’t play make believe per se the way that children do, but most adults do still daydream, which is what make believe becomes when we get older. The thing about our culture is that the things we as adults, or even our children “play” with involve today’s technologies. You can’t tell me that listening to your iPod, watching a DVD on your big flat screen HDTV, playing with your Wii are not “play”. It may not be as creative as the DIY days of yore, but it’s definitely play, and adults these days spend FAR more of their time playing than did adults a generation or two ago.
I’ll compare myself, my friends, my cousins, and other people my age to all of our parents. We have all sorts of electronic gadgets and games. I for example went over to someone’s house recently, we had a few drinks and played Rock Band. When I was a kid, my parents might go over to someone’s house, have a few drinks and play cards. A couple generations before that, you might have been apt to find people who worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, who never once stopped to play cards. Modern technology has led to many conveniences which have on one hand made our lives very hectic, but on another left us with a fair amount of liesure time. Yesterday the complaint was that you didn’t have enough money to buy the fun things, today the fun things are cheap and abundant, but we don’t have enough time to enjoy them all.