59+ Ian Bogost Quotes On Technology, Ai And Communication

Ian Bogost is an American video game designer, critic, and professor. He is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he holds the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Chair in Media Studies. He is best known for his work on the video game Cow Clicker and the persuasive games genre, which uses video games to explore social and political issues. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ian Bogost on technology, ai, communication.

Top 10 Ian Bogost Quotes

1. 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.
2. For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.
7. The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.
8. We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
9. I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.
10. Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.

Ian Bogost Short Quotes

• The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
• The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
• Every now and then if you try, you can discover something new.
• You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.
• We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.
• My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.
• The universe is not particularly concerned with you.
• When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
• Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.

Ian Bogost Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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. — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

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

We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself. — Ian Bogost

The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family." — Ian Bogost

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

The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful. — Ian Bogost

I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel. — Ian Bogost

We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small? — Ian Bogost

I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you. — Ian Bogost

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

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer. — Ian Bogost

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

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. — Ian Bogost

There are also many things my wife can't stand about me, and there are certain capacities that she has that are different than mine. The trick is to find compatibilities. — Ian Bogost

To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living. — Ian Bogost

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

There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship. — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun." — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow. — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning. — Ian Bogost

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

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

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. — Ian Bogost

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

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. — Ian Bogost

Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right? — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

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. — Ian Bogost

Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals. — Ian Bogost

Normally if you're dating, you're looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, "Well, swipe left on that, let's just keep looking." In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It's just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change. — Ian Bogost

My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course. — Ian Bogost

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

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

Life Lessons by Ian Bogost

1. Ian Bogost's work emphasizes the importance of creating meaningful experiences through video games, rather than simply focusing on entertainment.
2. He advocates for the use of video games as a tool for exploring complex social issues, such as politics and economics.
3. He also encourages game designers to think critically about their design decisions, and to create thoughtful and meaningful experiences for players.