Play Anything Quotes

“Boredom is the secret to releasing pleasure. Once something becomes so tedious that its purpose becomes secondary to its nature, then the real work can start.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“She was having fun, but her fun emerged from misery. Fun isn’t pleasure, it turns out. Fun is the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation. Fun almost demands boredom: you need the sense that nothing good could possibly arise from an experience in order for the experience of finding something there to smolder with the hot pleasure of surprise. Likewise,”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Boredom sends up a flare: meaning exists here, boredom beckons, but stranded meaning. Meaning that requires rescue.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“The ultimate lesson games give is not about gratification and reward, nor about media and technology, nor about art and design. It is a lesson about modesty, attention, and care. Play cultivates humility, for it requires us to treat things as they are rather than as we wish them to be. If we let it, play can be the secret to contentment. Not because it provides happiness or pleasure—although it certainly can—but because it helps us pursue a greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Irony keeps reality at a distance. It has become our primary method for combatting the external world’s incompatibility with our own desires. Today’s irony uses increasingly desperate efforts to hold everything in between welcome embrace and sneering mockery. Irony is the great affliction of our age, worthy of its own disorder.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“games aren’t the opposite of work, but experiences that set aside the ordinary purposes of things.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Children aren’t only less inhibited than adults; they are also less powerful, and smaller too. They may or may not be more open-minded and liberated than grown-ups, but they are forced to live in a world that wasn’t designed for them, and one that is not primarily concerned with their desires and their welfare. And so children are constantly compromising, constantly adjusting to an environment that is clearly not theirs, not yet. That’s wisdom, not innocence.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once observed that the simple act of asking yourself, “Where did I put my keys?” performs unexpected magic: it transforms the world into a catalog of possible key locations.1 Under the couch, somewhere the dog or the baby moved”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“By manipulating the physical configuration of [any situation], you make it produce a subset of the infinite pattern of [possibilities]. And even if you don't know how to play [above situation], you can still play with it.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“My daughter showed us the key: misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn't designed for you, that isn't invested in you, that isn't concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were. ...this is what play means.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don’t need to understand their motivations and inner lives—whatever knowing the inner life of a tangelo or a floor tile would mean.4 We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work—to discover what they obviously and truly are—and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways. And”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“fun isn’t the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way. Think”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“If adults also don’t live in a world designed for us. Climate, entropy, accident, crowds, happenstance, erosion, heartbreak—we are fools to think that we are in control of the universe. Children are right to allow the humility of their smallness to rule the day. My misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Even if kids had time left after all of this regulation, they’re increasingly unable to partake in the world outside their schools and homes anyway. The 1950s hunter-gatherer childhood of Gray’s memory is partly a nostalgic myth in the spirit of Thoreau, for one part. For another, kids are largely prohibited from meandering on their own or in groups today. Writing in the Daily Mail, David Derbyshire contrasts a contemporary eight-year-old schoolboy (Edward), with his great-grandfather (George) of the same age.5 In 1926, George was able to meander some six miles to a pond to fish. Eighty years later, Edward is driven everywhere, even to safe, predetermined venues for bike riding. This shift didn’t happen all at once. Edward’s grandfather Jack was afforded a mile of freedom from his house at age eight, in the 1950s. His mother, Vicky, was allowed to wander about a half-mile away, to the local pool, in the late 1970s. By 2007, little Ed was permitted to stray less than three hundred yards from his door, as far as the end of the street.”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Playgrounds are only possible when we bracket the potential boredom or trauma in the things we encounter so that their material properties can guide us to new ways of engaging them. The crappy Instagram, Shore’s uncommon places, and the Mad Men crew’s thrift-store scavenging for set decoration all do the same thing. They recast something familiar in a relatively minor way, one that yields very little to our human desires unless we quiet them through physical therapy—by working with them, by manipulating them in our heads and then our hands. By playing with them. The”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Is there really any difference, the writer Jeb Boniakowski once asked, between highly engineered and processed foods like the kind you find at McDonald’s, and molecular gastronomy, the application of food science to cooking that became popular in modernist haute cuisine establishments like elBulli and Alinea? Boniakowski draws a powerful conclusion that should be obvious in retrospect: “I’ve often thought that a lot of what makes crazy restaurant food taste crazy is the solemn appreciation you lend to it.” But we tend to limit our indulgence of that appreciation. Boniakowski offers a delightful thought experiment to illustrate the point: If you put a Cheeto on a big white plate in a formal restaurant and serve it with chopsticks and say something like, “It is a cornmeal quenelle, extruded at a high speed, and so the extrusion heats the cornmeal ‘polenta’ and flash-cooks it, trapping air and giving it a crispy texture with a striking lightness. It is then dusted with an ‘umami powder’ glutamate and evaporated-dairy-solids blend.” People would go nuts for that.20 Even”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“In late 2014, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson sold his company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Notch published a depressive justification for his desire to recede from public life thanks to the impossibility of satisfying the onslaught of demands from his customers and fans—another thing that can turn on you, it turns out. Then he bought a $70 million Beverly Hills mansion, along with all the furnishings, accessories, art, even the cases of champagne and tequila, even the ultraluxury vehicles the real estate speculator who built the place had installed within its sprawling garage for staging. Notch, the man who made a blank canvas world in which you could make anything, used the spoils to buy a prepackaged, off-the-shelf billionaire’s life. As for his fans, undeterred, they dutifully reconstructed a version of the $70 million mansion in Minecraft.16 It’s an addict’s logic: only one more hand, only one more hit, then I’ll be satisfied. Then I can stop. But, of course, that’s not how addiction works. With every repetition, the effect of a compulsion reduces, requiring even more stimulation to produce formerly intoxicating results. Such”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish made a plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in Minecraft’ posts, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft. Thanks.” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical visual style. The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane things, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from Minecraft. Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philosopher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”14 In a futile attempt to prevent further metastasis, the blogger concluded his post with the line, “Yes, we’re fully aware of the irony of this post.”15 But rather than satisfying anyone, such a provocation only further irritated the ironoiac itch. Fish tweeted a link to the blog post covering the Minecraft construction of a model of Fish’s tweet protesting blog posts about Minecraft constructions, which one of his followers one-upped by observing the fact that Fish had in fact “tweeted about somebody blogging about somebody making [his] tweet about Minecraft in Minecraft.” Another chimed in, “How long ’til someone recreates that blog post in Minecraft?” Each step represents an attempt to overcome the absurdity of the last by fixing it in a new voice, even though each ironic gesture was evanescent, quickly replaced by yet another layer of buffer from yet another desperate ironoiac. Why do we do it, then? Today, satisfaction is more elusive than ever. In part, the precarity of life after the 2008 global financial collapse and the Great Recession that followed it (and whose effects still linger) makes every transaction with the world feel suspect and risky. We fear that things might turn on us, because we have good evidence that they can, and do. But”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“But games aren’t magic, and the most special thing about them isn’t unique to them anyway—their artificial, deliberately limited structures teach us how to appreciate everything else that has a specific, limited structure. Which is just to say, anything whatsoever. Play isn’t our goal, but a tool to discover and appreciate the structures of all the malls and fishbowls we encounter. Once”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

“Irony keeps reality at a distance. It has become our primary method for combatting the external world’s incompatibility with our own desires. Today’s irony uses increasingly desperate efforts to hold everything in between welcome embrace and sneering mockery. Irony is the great affliction of our age, worthy of its own disorder. I”
― Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games