Quotes from Ian Bogost

God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.

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.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps in another few thousand years, the aliens who take over our planet will note the quaint and weird sport of Association Football, an ancient forerunner to whatever becomes their modern foot-and-ball game. Perhaps it will be played with the heads of vanquished humans.

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.

Play isn't doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.

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.

Boredom sends up a flare: meaning exists here, boredom beckons, but stranded meaning. Meaning that requires rescue.

games aren't the opposite of work, but experiences that set aside the ordinary purposes of things.

Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk-flavored chewing gum.

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

Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.

The density of being makes it promiscuous, always touching everything else, unconcerned with differentiation. Anything is thing enough to party.

If we take seriously the idea that all objects recede interminably into themselves, then human perception becomes just one among many ways that objects might relate. To put things at the center of a new metaphysics also requires us to admit that they do not exist just for us. The Computer

fun isn't the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way. Think

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

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