Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
JULIEN CROCKETT: You dedicate Playing with Reality to the next generation, writing, “If play is the engine of creation, I cannot wait to see what new worlds you build.” A recurring theme in your book is the primacy of play and games to what it means to be human—that playing games is universal, an instinct. What makes games and play so important to understanding ourselves?
KELLY CLANCY: Play is something that predates humans. It’s fundamental to how animals engage in and understand the world. It’s how we test and figure out the rules of our environment, how social relationships work. Part of the idea to focus on play in the book was generated from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), where they go through different ancient societies and show not only how incredibly diverse they were—contrary to the idea that there is a monolithic trajectory from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist to industrial society—but also how incredibly playful all of these societies were. More recently, at events like Carnival in Renaissance Europe, people would put on costumes and participate in taboo things like gambling, having affairs, and drinking. There were all of these opportunities to release the strictures of society and try something new.
This is something that I think we’re missing in our current society but that maybe the internet is giving us—an opportunity to put on a new mask, a new personality, and to act in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily in our everyday interactions.
More here.
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