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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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Ian Bogost
Age: 47
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Fun
Means
Problem
Mean
Really

More quotes by 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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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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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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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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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.
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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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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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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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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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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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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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
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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Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
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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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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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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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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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
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