Ian Bogost Quotes
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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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If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.
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There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.
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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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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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The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.
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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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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
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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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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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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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The universe is not particularly concerned with 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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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
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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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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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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
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This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn't mean that you get what you want.
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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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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
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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 modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family."
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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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You don't want to be told, "Hey, do whatever you want." That's what we think of when we think of play. It's the thing where you get to do whatever you come up with in your own mind, all bets are off, there's no boundaries.