Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, devel-oped a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas