In his classic 1938 book Homo Ludens – oddly, used only as a brief epigraph here – the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga defined play as the uniquely human ability to create free, voluntary and purely ornamental activities that are clearly removed from the brutal course of nature. For Johnson, the play impulse is unstoppable, felt in everything from Minecraft to the Dorito chipīut Johnson’s concept of play feels too broad to be really useful.
He is surely right that a time traveller from half a millennium ago would be amazed to see how much space and time we devote to play in the form of theme parks, sports stadiums, Imax cinemas and living rooms stuffed with TVs, tablets and games consoles. Its border-defying, cosmopolitan instincts are felt in everything from Minecraft, an online universe peopled by players of all nations, to the Dorito chip, a “true citizen of the world” which encapsulates the whole history of the spice trade. And he posits a fascinating counterfactual reality in which moving pictures cannot exist – since they work only because our eyes, for no good evolutionary reason, create the illusion of movement at 12 frames per second.įor Johnson, the play impulse is unstoppable.
He points out that for a millennium before the fall of Rome, an ounce of purple dye from the Phoenician city of Tyre was worth more than an ounce of gold. Johnson, as you can tell, has a flair for the telling fact that would thrill a QI elf.
This in turn inspired the “spread spectrum” technology used for mobile phone and wifi networks. During the second world war the composer George Antheil and the film star Hedy Lamarr used the pianola’s perforated-ribbon idea to invent a remote-controlled torpedo that could not be radio-jammed by the enemy. Songs encoded in piano-roll format were, in a sense, the first software. In another chapter, on music, Johnson shows how in the 1900s the pianola, or self-playing piano, established the powerful business model of selling code. Further journeys in pursuit of uselessly beautiful dyes, patterns and fabrics led to the emergence of fashion, consumerism and the shopping mall. The lure of purple led ancient seafarers, in search of snail dye, to sail beyond the Mediterranean into the Atlantic for the first time. About 4,000 years ago, for instance, the Minoan peoples of the Aegean found that the secretions of the murex sea snail could be used to make a rare purple dye. His method is to start with an odd detail and then trace its even odder effects on unrelated fields. Johnson is an engaging writer, unable to bore the reader even when you know what his point is going to be.
This book diverges from Dyer’s prescription, however, in that reading the rest of it is no tedious obligation.
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