Quote

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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Ian Bogost
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: December 30
Entrepreneur
Philosopher
University Teacher
Video Game Designer
Video Game Developer
Writer
Goals
Goal
Forcing
Making
Laws
Spouse
Art
Habit
Drives
Kids
Parents
Doomed
Better
Crazy
Annoying
Sometimes
Parent
Swimming
Way
Stop
Math
Law

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
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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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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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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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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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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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 playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It's rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.
Ian Bogost
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
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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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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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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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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The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
Ian Bogost