Ian Bogost Quotes
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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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I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
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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.
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There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities.
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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.
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Actually a lot of the supposedly serious and meaningful and worthwhile content on the podcast or on the television is no more or less meaningful than the clothes in the laundry basket or the dishes in the sink. It's more a matter of the attention you're willing to bring to them, where you're willing to allow meaning and pleasure and the light to escape.
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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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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow.
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Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.
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It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.
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When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.
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Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.
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Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
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The playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It's rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.
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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
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A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
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I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.
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We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.
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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
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My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course.