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
fun thinking
A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
fun people
Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."
fun thinking miserable
We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself.
fun extraordinary
When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
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.
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.
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.
fun mean impossible
If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
fun thinking people
Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
sports fun night
With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.
depressing home thinking
We have to always spread sugar on top of it in order that we can tolerate swallowing the things we're supposed to do, which is an incredibly depressing way of thinking about living your life. Not just that your work or your home life would be so miserable that you have to slather sugar on it, but then the sugar is all you're tasting. If that's the only way that I'm finding meaning, then we have this sort of mental diabetes that we're descending into.
dream thinking interesting
We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?