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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.

Ian Bogost

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Ian Bogost
Age: 47
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Feel
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Head
Trick
Feels
Given
Asks
Contentment
World
Feelings
Within
Tricks
Around
Face
Satisfaction
Problem
Turns
Demand
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Interesting
Value
Come
Happiness
Took
Flip
Whole
Values
Turn
Gratification

More quotes by Ian Bogost

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There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
Ian Bogost
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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
Ian Bogost
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Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
Ian Bogost
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If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say Well what do you mean? it's almost impossible to answer.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost
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Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.
Ian Bogost
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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.
Ian Bogost