In his book, Play Anything, Ian Bogost aims to explain how fun and play are not the same thing. He claims that “fun” is not pleasure but rather the aftereffect of play. This book challenges almost all notions of play, fun, pleasure, boredom and happiness. In this post I try to summarise the key ideas from the book.
What is play and fun
Misery gives way to fun when you take the constraints that aren’t designed for you and then treat it if it were a source of fun. Do something particular with the material you have is playing. The example that Bogost begins with is his trip to the mall with his daughter. He treats this visit to the mall as a chore and is frantically running around to finish the shopping. His daughter, on the other hand, is having fun. He is walking faster than is comfortable for his daughter but she makes the best of it by designing a game of trying to land her feet in tiles in a certain pattern. She is playing with the constraints of the mall.
This is the essence of play. Play is hard and needs work. Playing requires more attention, generosity, ingenuity and creativity than real life does. Play mostly lies on the other side of the disgust that is associated with boredom and in that way boredom is essential to concoct play.
Fun is the aftermath of taking an existing and well defined structure and making it do something different. It requires effort. Golf, for ex is not a good walk spoiled as the old aphorism goes, it is a purposeful manipulation of landscape to provide us fun. Things that usually make life hard are what make it fun. Mary Poppin’s spoonful of sugar is not the right way to derive fun but to accept things as they are and working with them.
It is often taking something visible and making it invisible and taking something omnipresent but not visible and making it conspicuous. Pleasure doesn’t always sneak up on us. Sometimes we seek out repetition of the known. The “experience of expertise” is also related. The joy of mastery is a type of pleasure that doesn’t surprise but rather offers something recognisable and predictable.
Worldfulness and everyday play
An interesting point that Bogost makes is that, while mindfulness is being comfortable with oneself, “worldfullness” is being comfortable with ourself and the world around us. This allows us to create play. We ignore things around us as we are “busy” and we seek “better things”. The Japanese Shinto philosophy that states every object has a living spirit.
Frustration with everyday things comes from the gap between expectations and reality. When we don’t internalise the world around us, we don’t get frustrated and realise that the world is outside our head and then open ourselves up to embracing the constraints to give life new meanings.
We treat people and objects based on how they make us feel about ourselves. A better way to interact with the world is to work with things around us and appreciate them for what they are. We think of a playground (real one or the one in our mind) as a way to fulfil some objective or exert some control, we drain it of its real fun. This is related to the Buddhist philosophy of expectations/desires being the root of all sorrows and Sikh philosophy that one should yield oneself completely to the one force that flows through all of us. In that sense, real play begins when we compel ourselves to the desires of the swings and slides and the see-saws and do what they need of us.
When you deliberately explore the depths of a boring activity, something magical happens, that magic is what we call “fun”. Bogost also calls it the “solemn appreciation” of something. I run a boring SaaS business and often lose sight of how much fun it really is.
My key takeaway from this book is how solemn appreciation of everyday things like an accounting software or Cheetos can make them as much “fun” as say, an acoustic guitar or a cheese plate.
Ironoia
Irony is saying something while meaning something totally different. Its a sort of get out of jail card that we use to never truly interact with the world. It’s like a sofa cover that at the same time protects the sofa upholstery from damage but also prevents us from ever really experiencing the sofa in the first place. When we walk into a big box retail outlet like Walmart, a bunch of negative emotions greet us - our own consumerist attitude, degradation of aesthetics, encouraging the death of the small mom and pop store and so on. At the same time it is an oasis for those who can afford a certain lifestyle thanks to their prices.
The irony blinds us from seeing Walmart as what it also is, a modern day Cathedral of the various artefacts of human effort like the dora the explorer cherry berry bubble bath, white weed healthy white bread, hard candy nail polish jars, optimus prime pinata, etc Ironoia, as the author defines, is keeping everything we see around us at an arm’s length in case something better comes along. It is the metaphorical sofa cover that prevents us from ever experiencing the sofa.
Finding play and intrigue in everyday things like a vacuum or going grocery shopping is a good way to live. Randomly browsing things in a Walmart can also be enriching and fun. We musn’t let ironia prevent us from experiencing the world around us.
The power of constraints
Bringing the number of available options down makes satisficing easy and can lead to overall satisfaction. Schwartz called this the paradox of choice. In theory, choice makes us happy but too much choice adds cognitive load that can take away the joy from pursuing anything. Suppression of choice can also lead to a more meaningful interaction with the environment. When we silent our phones while eating, we are suppressing a choice which makes the meal more enjoyable. There are pleasures in both having too many choices and having fewer choices.
Limitations create playgrounds within which exploration can take place. Poetry with its meter, everyday things like the door knob with its rotation mechanism, our business goals with the constraints, are all examples of everyday games that make life fun. Dr Zeuss’s Cat and Hat and Green Eggs and Ham books use less than 50 words and have sold millions of copies. This is also an example of how constraints, that are often hidden from us, create wonderful experiences.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.