PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 5
Foreword
Paul Pethick
May 2026
This book is an attempt to take ‘play’ out of its standard confining box,
and reframe it as the underlying energy which shapes pretty much
everything we do, from cradle to grave. Especially everything creative.
To try to show it’s our unique facility for play, in all its forms, which is
the only thing that really sets us apart.
It’s a broad and deep exploration, specifically so it doesn’t just reinforce
the same old tropes which always seem to get dragged along with this
subject; and it may well go into areas you’ve never really thought of as ‘play’.
•
At the start of writing there was something unconsciously guiding me
about the form it might take, and I slowly came to realise it was a genius
short film I saw as a child. It affected me deeply back then, and it’s been
an imaginative lens many times in the decades since. The film is ‘Powers
of 10’ by Charles and Ray Eames, which narrates an amazing journey
from the microscopic inner workings of our biology, zooming outwards
past the planetary scale of life on Earth, and far out into space.
Without being too grandiose (I hope), I wanted to show play at work in
something like the same sense. All the way from the intangible cogs of
our imaginations, and our evolution, out to the immersive games we’re
all playing every day. And also illustrating the endless choices our ability
to play with life offers; now and from here on.
•
The original print version came out soon after the CoVid lockdowns.
Possibly the last wave of writing not enhanced by machine learning.
With the whip-fast tech accelerations driving change in every area of
life since, not to mention various vicious conflicts in the world, and
an overarching sense of culture war, I assumed I’d need to update a
lot of the references by now, because so much has happened. In fact
I think readers will add their own mental updates where they want.
And the few years’ perspective definitely seems to reinforce, at least
for me, a growing need to recognise how our games pull on life and,
most importantly, how we can always choose to play with anything we
want in the world, to reshape and, maybe, improve it.
We have the power, and the power is play.
Foreword
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