Ian Bogost Quotes
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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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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 a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
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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.
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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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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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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
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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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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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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
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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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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
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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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Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
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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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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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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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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.