Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost is a philosopher and video game designer. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies...
fun thinking something-new
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.
world natural limitation
The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
fun mean problem
The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
fun struggle thinking
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.
trying now-and-then something-new
Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
trying attention pay-attention
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.
kids prisoner
Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.
mean important done
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.
mean path laundry
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.
mean hard-work people
Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?
mean world frank
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.
effort universe
The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
fun thinking pleasure
We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
fun strange unusual
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.