Ian Bogost quotes

Be contemporary. Have impact. Strive for it. Be of the world. Move it. Be bold, don’t hold back. Then the moment you think you’ve been bold, be bolder. We are all alive today, ever so briefly here now, not then, not ago, not in some dreamworld of a hypothetical future. Whatever you do, you must make it contemporary. Make it matter now. You must give us a new path to tread, even if it carries the footfalls of old soles. You must not be immune to the weird urgency of today.
-- Ian Bogost

#Moving #Thinking #Impact

Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever-the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It's not abnormal, and it's not just for business. It's just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it's just life.
-- Ian Bogost

#Morning #Husband #Iphone

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

#Today #Speak #Lawns

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
-- Ian Bogost

#Fun #Mean #Problem

A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
-- Ian Bogost

#Fun #Thinking #Fun Movie

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
-- Ian Bogost

#Play #Ideas #World

Actually a lot of the supposedly serious and meaningful and worthwhile content on the podcast or on the television is no more or less meaningful than the clothes in the laundry basket or the dishes in the sink. It's more a matter of the attention you're willing to bring to them, where you're willing to allow meaning and pleasure and the light to escape.
-- Ian Bogost

#Meaningful #Light #Clothes

Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.
-- Ian Bogost

#Ordinary #Can Do #Urgent

The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
-- Ian Bogost

#Concerned #Universe

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Thinking #Play #Stuff

Play isn't you being clever, or finding a trick, or finding a way of covering over your own misery, or persuading someone to do what you want. It's the process of working with the materials that you find and discovering what's possible with them.
-- Ian Bogost

#Clever #Play #Over You

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Fun #Strange #Unusual

Wouldn't we all rather have the possibility of finding pleasure and delight in literally anything we might encounter? Instead of assuming that actually there are only these three things where pleasure and delight are possible. Like oh, it's television and socialization and work, and then everything else is the smoke I have to somehow choke my way through in order to get to the good parts.
-- Ian Bogost

#Order #Encounters #Three

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Ideas #Interesting #Feelings

Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that's the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time.
-- Ian Bogost

#Mean #Opposites #Play

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Goal #Television #Laundry

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Play #World #Pleasure

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Thinking #World #Force

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.
-- Ian Bogost

#Kids #Play #Clothes

Once you get yourself on that path where you're willing to find something delightful in laundry and in dishwashers, it means that you train yourself to be able to find it almost anywhere in almost anything.
-- Ian Bogost

#Mean #Able #Path

You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
-- Ian Bogost

#Play

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."
-- Ian Bogost

#Jobs #Real #Thinking

You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?
-- Ian Bogost

#Play #Ideas #Asking

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.
-- Ian Bogost

#Trying #Attention #Why Not