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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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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.
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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
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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.
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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
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