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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

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Ian Bogost
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Thinking
Property
Engages
Like
Example
Steering
Understand
Column
Play
Columns
Important
Wheel
Way
Mechanism
Things
Wheels
Think
Turning

More quotes by Ian Bogost

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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
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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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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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
Ian Bogost
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If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.
Ian Bogost
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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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 this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.
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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The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family.
Ian Bogost
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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?
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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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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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.
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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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
Ian Bogost
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
Ian Bogost
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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
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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No one wakes up and says, Yay I get to mow the lawn! But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.
Ian Bogost