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...
Ian Bogost quotes about
trying now-and-then something-new
Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
fun mean problem
The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
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?
fun mean ordinary-life
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
thinking
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.
thinking you-choose
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.
thinking important property
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.
interesting feelings what-if
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.
You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
thinking mind boundaries
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.
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.
thinking world
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.
thinking people misery
I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
real thinking people
We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."