Ian Bogost
Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.Collection: Trying
You don't want to be told, "Hey, do whatever you want." That's what we think of when we think of play. It's the thing where you get to do whatever you come up with in your own mind, all bets are off, there's no boundaries.Collection: Thinking
The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.Collection: Fun
With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.Collection: Sports
If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.Collection: Fun
We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.Collection: Fun
Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.Collection: Fun
When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.Collection: Fun
When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.Collection: Fun
I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.Collection: Thinking
It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.Collection: Tiny Things
The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.Collection: Effort