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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.
- Sales Rank: #90193 in Books
- Published on: 2016-09-13
- Released on: 2016-09-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.00" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Review
"Proposing an aesthetic of play, [Bogost] 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] idea-driven prose of PLAY ANYTHING might remind you of the applied-philosophy tactics of an Alain de Botton... demonstrate[s] the importance of thoughtful, serious criticism on gaming and play." -New York Times Book Review
"Of all the books on this list, this may be the hardest to describe, and in my assessment that was an asset. The year saw a few new entries in the 'Tackle life's challenges like a game' category, a thesis that's gaining momentum, but this book goes deeper than most via an enlightening discussion of the role of limits in both games and life. Bogost strikes me as equal parts philosopher and savant game enthusiast-a systems thinker with a penchant for high score formulas-and I'm glad he wrote Play Anything because it's causing me to look at problems in a different way. Read it and I think you'll see why."-Dan DiSalvo, Forbes.com, Best Brain Books of 2016
"An erudite and often amusing book." -Wall Street Journal
"Play Anything isn't really just an argument for turning dull tasks into games. It's a manifesto for a different attitude to the world." -Guardian (UK)
"I can tell you that a great way to have fun with the job of writing a book review-to play while writing it-is by pursuing it earnestly and seriously as a book review. A humble, highly constrained genre. You tell people about the book. You tell them whether you think it's worth reading. (Yes.) And then, instead of allowing your ego to ruin everything by trying to make it cool, you move on in search of the next playground." -Slate
"Part personal meditation, part guide to living a happier life, Play Anything is a Walden for the 2010s." -New Scientist
"Play Anything is a one-stop workshop for how to play in the 21st century... a manifesto, and it declares that more recess is good for the soul. Maybe pick this one up in your off-time." -San Francisco Book Review
"Empowering, fresh, and engaged." -Kill Screen
"For anyone who cares or works with or thinks about things like fun, enjoyment, happiness, play, and games, Play Anything is a conceptual thrill ride. Poetic. Deeply philosophical. Refreshingly insightful. It will challenge almost everything that you think you know about play, and then lift you towards a new and remarkably freeing perspective on everything else." -Deep Fun
"An essential read for those seeking to understand how a new idea of play can be positive for our lives." -Library Journal, starred review
"[Bogost's] arguments are thoughtful and useful for approaching ordinary experiences. A delightful book that promotes playfulness with a purpose." -Kirkus Reviews
"It's difficult to imagine a book that takes on David Foster Wallace, Barry Schwartz, Mary Poppins, and a host of philosophers under one premise. Yet Bogost, professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding partner at a video games company, has done so." -Publishers Weekly
"Play Anything is nothing short of brilliant. It proves that philosophy can fun, that fun can be profound, and that play is in fact the bridge that connects what is most meaningful and what is most pleasurable in our daily lives. I will be recommending this provocative and entertaining book to everyone I know." -Jane McGonigal, bestselling author of Reality is Broken and SuperBetter
"This is one of those books that blossoms: now tacking through intellectual history, now seizing on philosophical argument, now touched by memoir. At its hybrid heart, you'll find the meaning of 'play,' as well as 'fun,' and maybe even 'life.' Maybe you pick it up because, like me, you're a fan of Ian Bogost's essays, or maybe because you've enjoyed one of his previous books. No matter how you approach it, Play Anything will surprise you. You'll realize: this is a book with big ambitions, carrying a theory of the world that is covertly radical and, by the end, nothing short of thrilling." -Robin Sloan, bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
"A landmark. Play Anything is a humane and personal theory of play for the supermodern age. Full of fascinating insight and fresh perspective, Play Anything shows how play serves as a fundamental tool for examining the world around us. Through play we limit, focus, constrain and experiment into order to bring certain aspects of our world to the fore while allowing others to recede. As the basis both for creativity and for well-being, as well as the antidote to detached irony, play is how we all recognize our Davids, big and small, from the infinite blocks of marble all around us." -Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack Technologies
"Play Anything is a profound book: both a striking assessment of our current cultural landscape, and at the same time a smart self-improvement guide, teaching us the virtues of a life lived playfully." -Steven Johnson, bestselling author of How We Got to Now and Everything Bad is Good for You
About the Author
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 .
Most helpful customer reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
The World as Artwork
By Frank Lantz
Here’s a game I like to play. Next time you are in an art gallery, turn away from the paintings and look at the people. Look at them as if that was the show. Look at the other visitors in the gallery exactly the same way you would look at the art, as if they had been put there to be seen, admired, analyzed, and understood. This game is harder than it looks. We don’t realize how many different ways of looking there are, and how different they are. But if you are able to successfully play this game you will learn some things. First, you will learn how ruthlessly we look at art, how rapacious and haughty and impatient and demanding we are. What is this? Where did it come from? What’s going on here? What does it mean? Do I like it? Is it worth my time? Turning our art gaze on our fellow humans is shocking, embarrassing, you will instantly want to recoil back to the polite and diplomatic gaze we use for each other. Don’t. Because if you persist in this rude game you will learn something else. Humans are amazing. Judged as artworks, random people are deeply, desperately, heartbreakingly beautiful. They are strange, surprising, fascinating. They are overloaded with complex patterns, the primal pleasures of platonic geometry mixed with the playful, self-referential curves of postmodern signifier-tricks. Looked at as artworks, humans are bottomless pools of hypnotic meaning – masterpieces of light and shadow, color and shape, symbol, signal and noise.
You can do the same thing just walking down the street, or in a coffee shop, or a business meeting, or standing in line at a bank. It doesn’t have to be people. It can just be a random street corner with its ordinary surfaces, and all the banal details of the regular world. If you can trick yourself into looking at things as if, as if they were someone’s work, as if they had been arranged with a purpose, you may find yourself overwhelmed with the world’s haunting beauty – the subtle echoes of shape and pattern, the way the light hits the bricks at just the right angle, the suspenseful mystery of an errant shadow, the perfect punchline of an upended cup.
This is the trick that Ian Bogost plays on himself, and us, in Play Anything. And according to this book it’s the trick that games are playing on us all.
This is a strange book, at first glance it looks a bit like self-help, pop psychology, or life advice, but it’s far weirder and more interesting than that. One of the early voices and key figures in the history of game studies, Bogost’s entire career has involved trying to figure out the tricky relationship between games and the world, starting with the primary question – what would it mean to take games seriously? How should we approach games as a topic for serious cultural criticism? For a long time, Bogost’s answer to that question involved thinking through the many ways games can be about the world. As a critic, and as a designer, he has emphasized how games, like other forms of media, can reflect the world – expressing ideas, operating rhetorically, conveying arguments through dynamic models and interactive systems. He has celebrated their power to communicate and persuade and cautioned against their enthusiastic adoption by the snake oil salesmen who would apply them as a magic elixir for shaping behavior.
This book marks something of a radical break with these concerns. In Play Anything games are treated less as things that work on or through or about or against the world and more as aspects of the world itself, invitations to experience the world as it is, not as we imagine, not for our sake, not in our interest, but on its own terms – blunt, indifferent, but also endlessly fascinating and sublime. The way a ball bounces, the way tetronimoes fit together, the way code functions. This new perspective is not a reversal of Bogost’s earlier concerns but it feels like the results of a dedicated effort to get beneath them, to discover something foundational about the underlying nature of play and games. His success in this effort suggests that this book belongs beside Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Suit’s The Grasshopper, and Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play as a key work in the field. It is probably Bogost’s best book to date, and that’s saying something.
It is also (and probably not unrelatedly) his most personal book. The threads that tie the book together are drawn from his life, his work, his family, his habits and hobbies. Bogost is a writer known for calculated erudition and acerbic wit and this book has both, but it has more. It is weird and warm; human, worldly. It is as if, contemplating the central thesis that games provide an opportunity to confront the stubborn truth of the world, he decided to let the lived reality of his own life guide his thinking. Rather than grand theory-spinning we get close observation of games and life as they actually are. Not idealized, not demonized, not disappointing, or frustrating, or thrilling, or boring or amazing or fantastic. Not life-changing, just life. But look at life, look at the ways it moves and doesn’t move. The world, with its limited degrees of freedom, unfolds into intricate arabesques more marvelous than any grand theory could contain. This is the secret of games as Bogost has come to understand them.
In addition to being deeply personal, Play Anything is also deeply philosophical. For those of us who have followed Bogost’s forays into Object Oriented Ontology without every quite understanding how they relate to his work on games, this book closes the loop, providing an intuitive and satisfying connection. The way that games draw us in to trace the convoluted surfaces of objects and rules and materials and code and the brute facts of their behaviors and interactions provides a model for a way of looking at the world beyond the demands of our egos and the distortions of our desires. (The apparent contradiction that OOO itself is an intensely human project, fully subordinate to our egos and desires, it just another one of those facts about the world that we can play with and admire.)
It has long been a habit of many ambitious game creators and critics to expound on the glorious potential of games while disparaging their current status. This book suggests a different way of thinking about games’ potential. It is not up to games to evolve into a more beautiful form, one more pleasing to us, more full of meaning. It is up to us to rise to the challenge they present – the challenge to inhabit the world’s corners, to see how they work and how we work inside them. The beauty of games is the play of close attention, and it’s all around us, waiting for us to look.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
It could be a book.... well, this book is for you regardless of who you are.
By Nick LaLone
Play Anything is a book that is hard to describe.
It could be a book for those looking to understand how to escape their misery.
It could be a book for game designers looking to connect more intimately with culture in their designs.
It could be a book for academics who want to understand how play is intimately connected to culture itself.
It could be a book for a parent who wants to understand their children better.
It could be a book for those who just cannot fathom millenials.
It could be a book for millenials who want to understand themselves.
It could be a book for David Foster Wallace fans.
It could be any of those things and more...or less.
Play anything is a book that manages to cross disciplinary lines, publics, fandoms, and all along the way, offer a simple, unintuitive position on the function of play as a function and creator of culture itself. I say unintuitive because much of the book is going to be counter to the lived experience. It must be counter, it must be unintuitive because intuitively, the tedium and boorish nature of everything we do is constantly defined as those things we shouldn't do. For us, those of us living those lives, the constraints of our everyday life (supermarket lines, getting gas, cooking food) are those things we cannot fathom. They are simply acts performed and tolerated throughout the day so we can do something "fun."
Yet, much like a fish who cannot comprehend water, it is those constraints that offer us a way to experience, to play with.
It is something fascinating to think about. If you are an academic who researchers games, I believe this book might be one of the more important pieces to hit game studies in quite some time. For me, I have long been frustrated that the concept of "magic circle" has been dissected from the definition of play. I have been frustrated that play's significance for culture has been mostly ignored. Game studies isn't about games, but about culture itself.
Do yourself a favor and head into this book as quickly as possible.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Great idea-sharing potential, very poor delivery
By Shawn Pierce
For the first time in a long time I started a book without finishing it.
The idea of starting a book without finishing it does not frazzle me as I would prefer not to be a slave to be a book that is leading me nowhere. However, I do consider myself able to bring out key details and ideas despite annoyances with a book or writing style.
I struggled with Bogost's writing style. He proclaimed his wonderful ideas (and they were really great ideas - no sarcasm) but in a way that was repetitive and boring. There were many insights that came up and interested me, but so much of it was weighed down by the cloudy presentation he gave in his book.
Also, despite his repetitive style, I continually found myself having to go back to the beginning of the chapter's to identify the definitions he gave to his key terms: boredom, fun, and games. I loved his definitions and they fit into a holistic worldview (one that I encourage) but they were muddled with so much extra verbiage that I couldn't see the forest for the trees or vice versa.
Overall, this is a book that has great idea-sharing potential. But it just doesn't deliver those ideas through a great medium.
For a more cogent presentation of Bogost's ideas, I would recommend checking out an interview between Bogost and Brett McKay of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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