Play is curiosity without a performance review.

Curiosity with a deliverable attached becomes work. Play is what it looks like when nobody is going to assess it: you follow the interesting thing, you abandon it, you try something stupid to see what happens. That freedom is where a lot of genuine discovery happens by accident.

Give yourself a stretch of exploring with no output expected. No documenting, no sharing, no learning goal. Just following what interests you. The lack of evaluation is what makes it work, and it is the first thing we tend to remove.