“How To Play” is a series of six essays commissioned by Wellcome Collection, to run alongside their exhibition Play Well.
Each essay looks at a particular social context, and explores the role that play and games can fulfil in that context. Alongside historical and theoretical perspectives, they integrate interviews with players and with game designers, and present rules for games that people can try out in different contexts - some old, some new, some digital, some purely physical.
The intent of the series is to use six very specific contexts as a set of windows into the role of play in adult lives more widely, and to experiment with a way of writing about games and play that takes inspiration from food and recipe writing, combining instructions, history, anecdote and theory.
The six essays are:
The essays were edited by Danny Birchall at Wellcome Collection; all images on this page created for the series by Thomas Farnetti.