Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

Posted on 24 August 2018 by Ian Bogost

How filling life with play whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient ageLife is boring filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails Nothing we d ever call fun But what if we ve gotten fun wrong In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities.The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations Soccer wouldn t be soccer if it wasn t composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal Tetris wouldn t be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it s the hard things in life that give it meaning.Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun Which is also how to live a good life Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints as sources for meaning and joy We can play anything by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears.Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today s chaotic world can only be tamed and enjoyed when we first impose boundaries on ourselves. Read Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games By Ian Bogost – kino-fada.fr Ian Bogost s Play Anything is a book about how play emerges from the limits in the world around us Ian introduces the world as a giant playground waiting to be discovered, ironoia as the mistrust of things and thus a barrier to emergent play, fun as the novelty and play as emergent quality of things not of us, individuals , and discusses emergent fun as an opposite of happiness Overall, this is the worst book I ve read from Ian Bogost there is little structure, much negative tone without Ian Bogost s Play Anything is a book about how play emerges from the limits in the ...Don t books have editors anyThis one certainly needed another pass or two with a red pencil.Look, Bogost is clearly a smart guy, and has some interesting insights into game design And there are definite flashes of brilliance here, especially in his chapter on the concept of ironoia Unfortunately, most of the book is an unfocused mess, with a tone that shifts wildly from pop culture drivel a la Malcolm Gladwell to a deep dive into advanced programming It s supposed to offer me Don t books have editors anyThis one certainly needed another pass or two with a red pencil.Look, Bogost is clearly a smart guy, and has some interesting insights into game design And there are definite flashes of brilliance here, especially in his chapter on the concept of ironoia Unfortunately, most of the book is an unfocused mess, with a tone that shifts wildly from pop culture drivel a la Malcolm Gladwell to a deep dive into advanced programming It s supposed to offer me amazing insights that will change how I view the world instead, it changes how I feel about my decision to read th...Unexpectedly gripping fascinating worthwhile A lot of the big players in my personal canon were put into conversation e.g DFW x video game design I m totally, one hundred percent convinced by Bogost and I can already feel the book subtly changing the way I live Two things I want to critique, though 1 I want a better argument for why his approach isn t sus...The absence of politics particularly anything even remotely resembling class politics isthan conspicuous Bogost claims that we look down our nose at Walmart and McDonalds because we mistake familiarity for a lack of authenticity 52f But most of us recognize that something else is at work in these examples there is virtually no mention of what kind of company Walmart is, what kind of people shop there, or how Walmart shoppers figure in our rhetoric and cultural imagination The absence of politics particularly anything even remotely resembling class politics isthan conspicuous Bogost claims that we look down our nose at Walmart and McDonalds because we mistake familiarity for a lack of authenticity 52f But most of us recognize that something else is at work in these examples there is virtually no mention of what kind of company Walmart is, what kind of people ...I m not sure I learned anything from this book I was looking forward to a primer on how to make lifeplayful I am perpetually pingponging between being way too stimulated and way too bored but it did not reveal too much about how to reify playfulness in everyday life There are a lot of extended meditations on irony, insincerity, consumption, etc but, as I began to suspect halfway in, it s one of those change your way of thinking books, not an implement a way of thinking books, making I m not sure I learned anything from this book I was looking forward to a primer on how to make lifepla...This is a thought provoking book that I really wanted to likethan I did Bogost is an important figure at the interface of game studies and philosophy that I desperately wish people in ludo musicology would heed Scholars of ludomusicology loosely, game music studies focus exclusively on large scale console video games, thereby excluding all of the other ways that games play and music intersect But I digress Despite this book s many merits, I found the tone and the examples This is a thought provoking book that I really wanted to likethan I did Bogost is an important figure at the interface of game studies and philosophy that I desperately wish people in ludo musicology would heed Scholars of ludomusicology loosely, game music studies focus exclusively on large scale console video games, thereby excluding all of the other ways that games play and music intersect But I digress Despite this book s many merits, I found the tone and the examples that he uses to be really limiting in their own way to the extent that I m not sure that I can wholeheartedly recommend this book without some serious caveats.So let me start with the positive This book is a wonderful rejoinder to Sherry Turkle s warnings about the decline of conversation in Reclaiming Conversation The Power of Talk in a Digital Age In fact, I d say that it has some of the best arguments about the value of cultivating boredom and re thinking joy tha...Here s what I took from this Ian Bogost offers guidance for navigating the banality of life, without veering into irony He suggests drawing a magic circle around particular situations or things, then treating these things as a playground You can play at lawn care, or play an errand at the mall, just as one wou...Whenever I was reading this book, the time always went faster than I expected, and I read further than intended, which is a nod to how well Bogost keeps his writing interesting, unexpected, and worthwhile Moments in the book become a bit too self involved, in that a reader is hammered over and over with an i...I don t often find books that I can t finish, but this was one of them I got into around the 2nd chapter before I completely gave up I even tried promising myself to read a book I had been waiting for but only after I finished this didn t work, I just didn t want to pick this book up again The writing felt disorganized to me, jumping from one place to another and not connecting the dots between them Maybe the content is good, but I just can t find the main ideas of the chapters It s all I don t often find books that I can t finish, but this was one of them I got into around the 2nd chapter before I completely gave up I even tried promising myself to read a book I had been waiting for but only after I finished this didn t work, I just didn t want to pick this book up again The writing felt disorganized to me, jumping from one place to another and not connecting the dots between them Maybe the content is good, but ...This isn t a book about how to improve your life by dealing with boredom in constructive ways, it s a book about unhappiness and how powerless we usually are to change it If I had known that going in, I might have liked this book bet...

Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games

24 August 2018

Ian Bogost