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Summary
Summary
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 age
Life 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.
Author Notes
Ian Bogost is the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in media studies and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a founding partner at Persuasive Games, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Bogost lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Follow him @ibogost
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It's difficult to imagine a book that takes on David Foster Wallace, Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice), Mary Poppins, and a host of philosophers under one premise. Yet Bogost (How to Talk About Videogames), professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at a video games company, has done so, with moderate success, while dissecting the notion of play. He defines playgrounds as "structures we discover," fun as "the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation," and play as "carefully and deliberately working with the materials one finds in a situation." Irony, the book's principal antagonist, is described as a "fundamental affliction of contemporary life." Bogost doesn't fully deliver on his grand promise to offer "a perspective on how to live in a world far bigger than our bodies, minds, hopes, and dreams and how to do it with pleasure and gratitude." Statements like "boredom is the secret to releasing pleasure" and "fun comes from wretchedness" are challenging to comprehend, much less credit. The book is abstract, interesting, complicated, confusing, and baffling, sometimes all at once. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Why the best way to happily take on the challenges of modern life is to turn them into games.Bogost (Media Studies and Interactive Computing/Georgia Institute of Technology;nbsp;How to Talk About Video Games, 2015, etc.) disputes the common view that playing games is merely a way to escape the trials and tribulations of life. Underlying the authors narrative is his rejection of the popular idea that happiness and pleasure are the results of escaping from the pressures of life. For him, rules are what make games fun; they provide a safe space in which a player can explore new possibilities and opportunities. As the author notes, looking at things in unconventional and whimsical ways can replaceor at least enhancethe tedium of routine. These kinds of mental tests provide zest to life and are pleasurable for their own sakes. The author examines games through the lenses of many disciplines, including metaphysics, aesthetics, psychology, and, most prominently, philosophy. Take the case of the humble stick. Recently inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York, along with the skateboard and the baby doll, the stick was chosen because it is very open-ended, all natural, the perfect price. However, Bogost digs deeper and sees it a bit differently. Sticks have properties such as length, breakability, woodenness, and sharpness, which define their potential and thus, subtly, rules for their use. Rules limit the open-endedness by establishing possible spaces in which working within them evokes creativity. It is no longer simply escapism but a kind of craftsmanship. Freedom then becomes an opportunity to explore the implications of inherited or invented limitations. Limits also involve humilitynot necessarily looking for happiness in ourselves but in pursuing greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us. Though some readers may think Bogost takes play too seriously, his arguments are thoughtful and useful for approaching ordinary experiences. A delightful book that promotes playfulness with a purpose. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
HOPSCOTCH. FANTASY SPORTS leagues. Settlers of Catan. Dungeons & Dragons. Beer pong. We are a nation at play. We love games. But there's nothing frivolous about it. In these digital days, to think about play means moving beyond Parcheesi boards and the phalanxes of Las Vegas blackjack tables. We must stare into the almost $100-billion-a-year video game abyss, an industry soon poised to overshadow all other forms of entertainment and diversion - motion pictures, television, books and Donald Trump combined. Three books examine the appeal and purpose of games, video and otherwise, probing the reasons some of these playthings have become so engaging, addictive and even good for you. In "Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games," Ian Bogost takes the widest angle view, promising to "upset the deep and intuitive beliefs you hold about seemingly simple concepts like play and its supposed result, fun." Bogost, who also wrote "How to Talk About Videogames," is a philosopher, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and video game designer. Proposing an aesthetic of play, he draws on myriad examples, from golf to the task of watering his lawn to his daughter's self-directed rules of "step on a crack, break your mother's back." The direct but oftentimes repetitive, idea-driven prose of "Play Anything" might remind you of the appliedphilosophy tactics of an Alain de Botton, even as Bogost makes no grand claim that games can make you a better person. Indeed, Bogost tries to disabuse us of what he perceives as the false gods of fun, ranging from the "spoonful of sugar" advice of Mary Poppins ("I dare you to try to follow this advice") to the decluttering mantra of Marie Kondo and the entire field of "happiness science." But games do combat "the fear of ordinary life," the feeling of "our minds flip-flopping between heartfelt commitment and sorrowful disdain," Bogost writes. "Games aren't appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order to play them." Fun is therefore "the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation." Hence, Pokémon Go, which, like soccer and other video games, is another "deliberate, if absurd, pursuit," as Bogost might call the smartphone game known for sending millions on quests to capture creatures named Venusaur and Muk virtually lurking in city parks and on your front lawns. A clear steppingstone on the road to Pokémon Go was Tetris. This legendary Russian video game, Bogost writes, involves the quick arrangement of "four orthogonally connected squares." Programmed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a young researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the game was the first-ever software to arrive from behind the Iron Curtain to this country. That history is the single focus of "The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World." The first-time author Dan Ackerman, a journalist and CNET editor, puts together, brick by painstaking brick, the tale of that journey, one that upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth. This version unfolds in the 1980s and '90s, during a Soviet age in which the term "distribution" meant delivering floppy disks by hand. When Ackerman evokes this clunkier era ruled by DOS, IBM PCs and Soviet bureaucrats clueless about property rights, the story shines. But when this rich setting is abandoned, the narrative falters (unless you're excited by endless minutiae about licensing negotiations). Oddly, despite interviewing many of the major players who shaped the destiny of Tetris, Ackerman includes almost none of their direct quotes or reflections. Further, Ackerman's main story is broken up by "Bonus Level" chapters that distractingly detail, for example, clinical uses of Tetris to study PTSD. Factoid-filled boxes also litter the layout; personally, I would have preferred screenshots of the game itself. These deficits aside, at least he makes clear what was groundbreaking about Pajitnov's creation: "the idea of using a video game to play with space and structure, with no distracting narrative elements or cartoonish mascots" such as Pac-Man. "Before Tetris and its trance-inducing waterfall of geometric puzzle pieces, video games were brain-dulling distractions for preteens." The question of why video games are so engrossing - O.K., even addictive - forms the DNA of "Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline." Simon Parkin's investigation was inspired by the shocking deaths of fanatical gamers in Taiwan and other countries, and seems to pick up where Tom Bissell's 2010 deep dive into the genre's allure, "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter," left off. Parkin, a gaming and gaming-culture journalist, has more interesting ideas than Ackerman, and more of a literary eye for scenic and investigative detail than Bogost. Making the case that video games "are somehow different" from films or novels, Parkin writes that playing one "leaves us reeling and bewildered, hungry and ghosted in the fug of chronoslip," his term for how digital games can create out-of-body experiences that are also out of time. "Death by Video Game" divides its argument into chapters - among them, "Success," "Belonging," "Mystery," "Healing" - that sound like attributes you'd want your avatar to possess on its path through a massively multiplayer online game. Each chapter profiles gamers or game designers immersed in their particular compulsion: Grand Theft Auto, Dance Dance Revolution, Eve Online and No Man's Sky; classics like Elite, Missile Command and Donkey Kong; indie games like Papers, Please (which asks players to assume the role of an immigration officer) or That Dragon, Cancer (which simulates the heartbreak of having a child with terminal cancer). If "Death by Video Game" begins to feel episodic and disjointed, it is: Nearly the entire book is a pastiche of profiles that originally appeared in publications like The New Yorker Online and Eurogamer. Parkin is not so much making an argument about video games as curiously plumbing the genre's appeal. "Video games give a person the opportunity to survive and thrive within a system," he offers, but they also "create unfamiliar places with unfamiliar vistas" where "people can belong. Many characters are blank sheets, ready for us to project our own stories and ideas onto." More violent games might "allow us to explore our own darkness." Tetris, he says, "replicates the sense of being overwhelmed as life's problems and demands pile up more quickly than you are able to clear them away." A game provides agency, whereas life can be unbeatable. For a man consumed with grief, a fantasy game like Skyrim provides refuge, a world of "easily digestible tasks," Parkin writes, that allows him "to be anchored." The "whys" behind our gaming obsession can seem as infinite as the digital playground of Minecraft. If the chockablock structures each of these authors concocts can, at times, feel as rote or automatic as grinding through the levels of a World of Warcraft quest, so be it. Each in its own way, these books demonstrate the importance of thoughtful, serious criticism on gaming and play. Humans are now firmly connected to this new medium that, unlike film or literature, has had only a few decades to find its voice. Meanwhile, as Bogost reminds us: "We don't even know what fun is." "We consume a book, but a game consumes us," Parkin says. Best we understand these beasts - whether Pokémon's Snorlax, Hypno or Wigglytuff or many others - because they stand poised now to devour us. ETHAN GILSDORF is the author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms."
Choice Review
In his newest book, Bogost (interactive computing, Georgia Institute of Technology) explores the nature of play, citing sources as diverse as Homer, Shakespeare, and Alfred North Whitehead. He argues that the nature of play is defined by the unique qualities and limitations of the game, the object, and the context rather than novelty alone or the needs and characteristics of the person engaged in play. Bogost argues that the current culture defines "play as fun" and "fun as pleasure." But he rejects the purpose of play purely as happiness. Defining play is the central focus of the book. Bogost argues that the cultivation of mindfulness or self-awareness should be replaced with cultivation of a state of mind he calls "worldfulness," a focus on the qualities and capacity of the other rather than on one's internal state. Play then is the activity of reconfiguring, constructing, or inventing the limitations of the objects, other people, and the surrounding context. The author uses examples from a wide range of authors and disciplines to illustrate his thinking. An interesting, thought-provoking read, the book is more likely to appeal to those familiar with Bogost's work as a game designer and technology pundit than to general readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; researchers and faculty. --Deborah L. Loers, Akoan Consulting
Library Journal Review
What is play? How do you define fun? -Bogost (Ivan Allen Coll. Distinguished Chair in Media Studies, Georgia Inst. of Technology; How To Talk About Videogames) has poured a lot of thought and work into answering those questions. His book doesn't argue for gamifying your life; it explores the conditions necessary for play and fun and convinces us to change how we think about these concepts. Bogost analyzes the everyday-lawn maintenance, golf, navigating a crowded shopping mall-and debunks long-held notions of pleasure. He takes on ideas from high and low culture, challenging in one breath the works of novelist -David Foster Wallace and German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and in the next taking down the "spoonful of sugar" from the musical Mary Poppins. Along the way, he examines play in the contexts of creativity, asceticism, boredom, pleasure, and novelty, and in the process challenges readers to rethink its applications. Perhaps Bogost's most trenchant move is pinpointing irony as fun's most powerful archenemy. -VERDICT An essential read for those seeking to understand how a new idea of play can be positive for our lives.-Paul Stenis, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Preface: Life Is Not a Game | p. ix |
| 1 Everywhere, Playgrounds | p. 1 |
| 2 Ironoia, the Mistrust of Things | p. 27 |
| 3 Fun isn't Pleasure, It's Novelty | p. 57 |
| 4 Play Is in Things, Not in You | p. 91 |
| 5 From Restraint to Constraint | p. 121 |
| 6 The Pleasure of Limits | p. 155 |
| 7 The Opposite of Happiness | p. 205 |
| Conclusion: Living with Things | p. 225 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 237 |
| Notes | p. 239 |
| Index | p. 251 |
