Alexis Rondeau

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

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Cover of Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games
Kindle

Ian Bogost

76 highlights · 11 notes · last read April 2023

Highlights I wrote a note on are shown in full. The other 65 are scrambled: the words are the author's, so here you only see where in the book I underlined something.

If we let it, play can be the secret to contentment. Not because it provides happiness or pleasure—although it certainly can—but because it helps us pursue a greater respect for the things, people, and situations around us.

Location 102

My note Playing makesyou happy because it helps you take things how they really are

we are fools to think that we are in control of the universe. Children are right to allow the humility of their smallness to rule the day.

Location 144

My note Children Can play because they don't believe they are in control

My daughter showed us the key: misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn’t designed for you, that isn’t invested in you, that isn’t concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were.

Location 145

My note Play is to treat a painfully boring situation as if it was made FOR ME

Play isn’t doing what we want, but doing what we can with the materials we find along the way.

Location 148

My note Play is using and engaging with what i got now

And fun isn’t the experience of pleasure, but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way.

Location 149

My note Fun is fiddling around

Think about a musical instrument, like a guitar. When you play it, you don’t do whatever you want—not at all. Rather, you do something very particular.

Location 150

My note Play is not doing what you want. Play is being PARTICULAR

And even if you don’t know how to play the guitar, you can still play with it. Just holding a guitar as if you have mastered it is a kind of play, a make-believe that signals soul and nonchalance.

Location 153

My note Play is PLAYING WITH X

play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do.

Location 158

My note Play means MORE INVESTMENT INTO REALITY not lesz

Confronted with the arbitrariness of the world and all its contents, we are faced with a challenge: how to make do, how to find meaning, how to thrive and flourish even though the universe is ultimately indifferent. One answer is to resist, to abdicate, to reject our surroundings, possessions, and relationships as potentially insufficient and therefore untrustworthy. But another answer is to embrace the stupidity of mall floors and guitars and everything else—to allow the things we encounter to set the terms for our scrutiny rather than insisting that our own ideas and expectations should rule our experience.

Location 159

My note Two ways to deal with an indifferent universe.

RESIST OR ENGAGE

I must find a way to accept the disaster. Frustration is one way of interpreting the difference between what I wanted and what lawns do. Another way is to acknowledge that the world is outside my head rather than within it.

Location 350

My note The world is outside my head

She had to increase her attention to detail in order to play, which runs counter to our ordinary conception of play as a release of attention and responsibility.

Location 404

My note Play means INCREASE in attention not less

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