The premise of the question, namely that "we need a direct object to form a passive sentence" is not correct. Active sentences with prepositional phrases can indeed be converted into passives, such as in the first example:
I am being played with (by him).
Google shows plenty of hits with the similar phrase "You are being toyed with".
In fact, all of the sentences listed can, in an exercise in syntax, be converted to the passive as follows:
I am being sat by by him
The bed was slept in by me
School was arrived at by Mary
The ground was fallen on by him
Whether such constructions are considered acceptable has a lot to do with why we use the passive in the first place. Clearly, the passive allows the speaker or writer to make a certain person or thing the subject of the discourse.
So, the active sentence:
The decorators arrived at the school shortly before dawn
could in theory be converted to:
The school was arrived at by the decorators shortly before dawn, and by late evening had been completely repainted
if we wish to make the school our focus, not the decorators.
No doubt the passive here would still be found questionable by some. And this may also have something to do with the greater acceptability of idiomatic verb + prepositional phrases in the passive. Compare the following two sentences:
The room has been gone into many times today.
This problem has been gone into many times.
The second sentence with its idiomatic use seems much more acceptable.
Best Answer
You are correct in believing that preclude requires a direct object. However, the example sentence is still correct, because here preclude has been put into the passive voice. You wrote:
This is equivalent to:
In this example it's quite clear that the object of preclude is a man, as expected. In the first example the direct object has been made the subject, as normal for passive constructions.
What is unusual about the first sentence is the fact that from is taking an ordinary noun as its object, while the normal idiom requires that the object of from be a verbal noun of some sort. So either of the following variants would be preferable: