Ian Bogost Quotes
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It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.
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Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.
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If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.
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If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
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Once you get yourself on that path where you're willing to find something delightful in laundry and in dishwashers, it means that you train yourself to be able to find it almost anywhere in almost anything.
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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
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We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself.
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My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.
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I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.
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We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.
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No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.
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Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that's the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time.
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Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say "What if I took the world at face value?" and then ask "What can I do with what is given?" it's an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.
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The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.
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Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.
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Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.
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We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?
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If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.
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I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
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There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.
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You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?
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The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.