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

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Copyright 2016 by Ian Bogost

Published by Basic Books,

an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Quote on page v from The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Copyright 2011 by David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

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BOOK DESIGN BY LINDA MARK

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bogost, Ian, author.

Title: Play anything: the pleasure of limits, the uses of boredom, and the secret of games / Ian Bogost.

Description: New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016019144 | ISBN 9780465096503 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability. | Popular culture--Social aspects. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture. | PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy. | PSYCHOLOGY / Creative Ability.

Classification: LCC BF408 .B566 2016 | DDC 306.4/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019144

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

If you are immune to boredom,

there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, THE PALE KING

Table of Contents

Contents

L IFE IS A GAME. IM SURE YOUVE HEARD THIS LITTLE adage. As a philosopher who is also a game designer, I hear it a lot. Its the easiest way for people to make polite conversation when they find out Im interested in the creation, use, and meaning of a contemporary technological medium like games, as well as big metaphysical questions like what does it mean for something to exist?

Like most aphorisms, it mostly feigns insight. Life is a game, and so... what, exactly? It ends, eventually? It pits you in a challenge against others? Or it puts you in collaboration with them? Or even that you, as a proverbial player, can manipulate people and things as if they were pawns in a game? Maybe it means that life is fun like a gameunless its not, of course, in which case maybe life is like a bad game.

Let me assure you that life isnt really a game, and I dont want to turn yours into one. Reality is alright as it is. Its just hard to see what it is. This book offers 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. I approach that topic through the lenses of game design and philosophyand psychology, anthropology, science, art, design, entertainment, computing, and literature.

The lesson that games can teach us is simple. Games arent 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. Soccer sees two teams of eleven players attempting to use their feet, torsos, and heads to put a ball into a goal. Tetris asks you to position falling arrangements of four orthogonally-connected squares in order to produce and remove horizontal lines. And yet the experiences games like soccer and Tetris create are far larger than those boundaries convey on their own. That bounty results from the deliberate, if absurd, pursuit of soccer and Tetris on their own terms, within the limitations they erect. The limitations make games fun.

What if we treated everything the way we treat soccer and Tetrisas valuable and virtuous for being exactly what they are, rather than for what would be convenient, or for what we wish they were instead, or for what we fear they are not? Walks and meadows, aunts and grandfathers, zoning board of appeals meetings and business trips. Everything. Our lives would be better, bigger, more meaningful, and less selfish.

Thats what it means to play. To take somethinganythingon its own terms, to treat it as if its existence were reasonable. The power of games lies not in their capacity to deliver rewards or enjoyment, but in the structured constraint of their design, which opens abundant possible spaces for play.

Play isnt unique to gamesits just easy to talk about play from the familiar vantage point of games. Play, generalized, is the operation of structures constrained by limitations. Maneuvering a soccer ball into a net without the use of hands and arms. Constructing patterns of lines using only the odd-shaped tetrominoes in Tetris. These constraints animate the games; they make them what they are. Play is not an alternative to work, nor a salve for misery. Play is a way of operating a constrained system in a gratifying way. This general act can apply to anything whatsoeversoccer and Tetris, sure, but also yard work and parenting, errands and marriage.

Over the course of this book, I will upset the deep and intuitive beliefs you hold about seemingly simple concepts like play and its supposed result, fun. Its not only that we dont know how to play effectively; its also that our ordinary sense of the term is wrong. We think that in play we do what we want, that we release ourselves from external duty and obligation and finally yield to our clearest, innermost desires. We think we know what we want, and we believe that we are in control of our fates. But all of these beliefs are mistaken.

We are obsessed with freedom, but we are also miserable and bored, despite living in an era of enormous surplus. Instead of seeing freedom as an escape from the chains of limitation, we should interpret it as an opportunity to explore the implications of inherited or invented limitations.

We might even need to do this, lest we fall into the madness of refusing the world rather than embracing it. We have many worries, but most of all we are afraid. Were afraid of ourselves and our fates, sure, but worse: we are afraid of our world and its contents. When confronting somethinga job or a love interest, sure, but even a ketchup jug or a Sunday afternoonwe worry that it might harm or disappoint us. We worry that it might fail to meet our expectations. We worry that it wont even stick around long enough that its worth having expectations, and then we worry about having worried about it so much.

We need to slough off all those false fears that keep us from truly living, and to replace them with a new sense of gratitude at the improbable, delightful miracle that such a bounty of possible loves and ketchups affords us. Play is the missing tool we need to accomplish this feat, but its not play as you know it. Its not selfish, thoughtless play, the play of just playing around, but the deep, deliberate play of soccer and of Tetris. When we play, we engage fully and intensely with life and its contents. Play bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things.