Ian Bogost Thinking Quotations

Be contemporary. Have impact. Strive for it. Be of the world. Move it. Be bold, don’t hold back. Then the moment you think you’ve been bold, be bolder. We are all alive today, ever so briefly here now, not then, not ago, not in some dreamworld of a hypothetical future. Whatever you do, you must make it contemporary. Make it matter now. You must give us a new path to tread, even if it carries the footfalls of old soles. You must not be immune to the weird urgency of today.

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.

We have to always spread sugar on top of it in order that we can tolerate swallowing the things we're supposed to do, which is an incredibly depressing way of thinking about living your life. Not just that your work or your home life would be so miserable that you have to slather sugar on it, but then the sugar is all you're tasting. If that's the only way that I'm finding meaning, then we have this sort of mental diabetes that we're descending into.

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.

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.

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."

I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

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.

You don't want to be told, "Hey, do whatever you want." That's what we think of when we think of play. It's the thing where you get to do whatever you come up with in your own mind, all bets are off, there's no boundaries.

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.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

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.

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.

A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.

We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.

Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.

When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.

Normally if you're dating, you're looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, "Well, swipe left on that, let's just keep looking." In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It's just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change.

The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.

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?