I think this roughly boils down to information theory and the exploration / exploitation tradeoff. Play is fun because it’s information-rich. It’s personally r

I think this roughly boils down to information theory and the exploration / exploitation tradeoff. Play is fun because it’s information-rich. It’s personally rewarding because exploration opens new doors. Exploitation is boring because it mostly discovers nothing new. It’s information-poor, and its reward is mostly fixed, and doesn’t open any new doors.