Johan Huizinga's "Homo Ludens" (1938) describes play as a free and meaningful activity, carried out for its own sake, spatially and temporally segregated from the requirements of practical life" - so if a life form autonomously plays, they would need a kind of poetic (non-instrumental) awareness. a non-practical, wholly aware/non-robotic state. Is a bird merely a flying, shitting, eating, fucking machine - or it is all these plus a reflective, communicative, sentient being with deep memory and unmeasurable affective capacity? - the answer is found in a video of a crow snowboarding