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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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Ian Bogost
Age: 47
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Figuring
Becomes
Play
Thing
Work
Things
Think
Thinking

More quotes by 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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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
Ian Bogost
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A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
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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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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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
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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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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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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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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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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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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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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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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
Ian Bogost
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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
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
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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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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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