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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.

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
Effort
Upon
Universe
Exert
Fairly
Actual
Limited

More quotes by 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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For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
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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You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
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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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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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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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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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're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
Ian Bogost