Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost
Ian Bogost is a philosopher and video game designer. He holds a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies...
Ian Bogost quotes about
fun people drowning
The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.
people world my-family
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."
choices
We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.
fun mean impossible
If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
trying now-and-then something-new
Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
fun mean problem
The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
mean hard-work people
Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?
fun mean ordinary-life
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
thinking
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.
thinking you-choose
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.
thinking important property
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.
interesting feelings what-if
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.
You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
thinking mind boundaries
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.