Ian Bogost Quotes
Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.
If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
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.
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.
Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."
It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.
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.
There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.
There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities.
When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
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.
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.
I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn't mean that you get what you want.
The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.
If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.
The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
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.