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
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.
future games hope pay people spend
People don't have to pay right now anyway, ... But, of course, I hope there is a future for my games where people would spend money.
campaigns expose exposing good huge lots mount precedent sort speech underlying videogames work wrong
Advertisers, governments and organizations mount huge campaigns to show us what they want us to see, and we want to expose what they're hiding. There's lots of precedent for this sort of speech in print, in film (and) on the Web, but we think videogames are particularly good at exposing the underlying logics of these organizations--how they work and what's wrong with it.
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?
wife kitchen desire
My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course.