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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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Ian Bogost
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Whatever
Constraints
Tell
Structures
Kids
Prisoner
Come
Pretend
Play
Gonna
Even
Structure
Fort
Going
Build
Forts
Clothes
Prisoners

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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When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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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.
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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
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