Early this year I read Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost after my attention was drawn to it by one of my social media acquaintances who, like me, is interested in games and game design. Unfortunately I didn't find it nearly as worthwhile as he did. Here is my review:

What are the big ideas?

Bogost introduces the term “playground” for the boundary, both physical and conceptual, that we set up around a space to turn what happens inside it into play. It's the virtual membrane that separates what's part of play from the rest of the universe. Moving around a room is just moving around a room, but if you add a conceptual constraint like “the floor is hot lava, you can't touch it” you've transformed it into play. If, like me, you're familiar with some of the philosophy of games you might find this to be very similar, if not identical, to the concept of the “magic circle”.

He makes the case that “fun” isn't a synonym for “pleasure”; that fun isn't “the effect of enjoyment released by a system” but is the experience of operating a system, especially operating it in a novel way. He's saying that a game isn't a system that rewards you by giving you hits of pleasure, he's saying that “fun” is the name we give to the subjective experience of manipulating systems. This seems to make sense to me: while having fun is a positive experience, it strikes me as a distinct and different sort of experience than the pleasure I'd get from something like eating a delicious meal.

He believes that humanity is afflicted by the malady “ironoia” (irony + the suffix of paranoia), and estrangement from “things” caused by fear of “things”. He asserts that the commonly suggested antidotes to irony, sincerity or earnestness, are themselves merely manifestations of ironoia, and what is really needed is a different outlook on the world in which things are engaged with on their own terms.

Since his conception of fun involves interacting with systems, and any things you can encounter in the world are hooked into a variety of systems, interacting with things on their own terms will tend to be a playful way of engaging with the world. He calls this mode of engagement “worldfulness” to contrast it with the much-buzzed-about “mindfulness”. Bogost puts forward the notion that worldfulness is a superior alternative because it doesn't selfishly recast everything in the universe in terms of what it can or can't do for you emotionally the way that irony, asceticism, or mindfulness do. Bogost thinks that worldfulness is the true opposition to ironoia.

The Writing

For a book where selfishness or egocentrism seem to be the cardinal sins (for example, Bogost sees Buddhism as people selfishly try to avoid suffering by reducing their sense of attachment) the writing in this book came across to me as remarkably self-involved. An anecdote about walking in a mall with his daughter becomes a parable about the nature of play, his misadventures in lawn care demonstrate how profoundly he has recast interactions with things in terms of play, his trip to WalMart... I'm not entirely sure what he wanted us to take away from his WalMart experience, but what I took away is how culturally disconnected he is from people who shop at WalMart. I found some of the writing to be nearly laugh-out-loud funny in terms of how insular it seemed, for example:

I have never felt such depths of ghastly, hopeless boredom as I have on transpacific flights of fourteen hours or more. Spending that long strapped to a chair in a humming metal tube is an unnatural fate that challenges the limits of one's very humanity. It's the closest an ordinary person can come to state-sponsored torture.

Now I know what you're thinking: Does he talk about David Foster Wallace? Because David Foster Wallace must be contended with. Actually you're probably not thinking that, but I get the impression that Ian Bogost thinks you are, and he has no plans to disappoint you. A lot of the quirks of the writing, like constantly circling back to David Foster Wallace, struck me as weirdly projecting his own hangups onto the world.

Being so inside-his-own-head and disconnected from what other people believe is a problem, because one of his projects is busting what he perceives as public misconceptions. Some of that may be deserved, such as the sense that “fun” is shallow, carefree, and disengaged (to bust that misconception one needs simply take a look at a strategy gamer who is fully employing their mind in a very organized and purposeful way). But some of it is bewildering, since it's not clear to me that he has an accurate sense of what people actually believe. His focus on “things” seemed odd to me for most of the book since components of many games are purely conceptual, such as the rules of the game, and have no physical embodiment or material properties. Near the end he finally explains why he's focusing on physical things so much:

When we talk about “things,” we most often mean them as concepts or abstractions in our minds, rather than as, well, things – toasters or wind or combine harvesters. As with happiness, things become things of ours. “How are things?” you ask a friend. “I dunno,” she replies, “things are weird,” or “A strange thing happened to me on the way home,” or “The thing I like most about you is that you're so thoughtful to ask!”

He thinks that when most people hear the word “things” they'll think of mental abstractions rather than physical objects? On what planet? I try to be humble about projecting what I think as what “everybody” thinks since that's a common human failing, but I'd be amazed if Bogost wasn't the one who was out of step here.

Does it deliver on substance?

I'm not sure. There are some things the book says that seem right to me and which would probably seem novel to many, but I found myself grading Bogost's claims as “close, but not quite” relative to my own ideas about how fun and games work, and I wasn't motivated to shift my views toward anything Bogost said. Some of his claims seem insufficient enough to strike me as wrong. For example, he says “Fun comes from the attention and care you bring to something, even stupid, seemingly boring activities”. As I snarkily observed on social media, wouldn't that hypothesis predict that filling out tax forms is fun? He also vaguely observes that embracing constraints has something to do with fun, but as any game designer should be aware not just any constraints will do, some work better than others at being fun, and it's not a simplistic “more = better” relationship. So I think he's getting in the right ballpark with regard to fun and play, but since he doesn't engage with what seem like obvious follow-up questions it seemed inadequate to me.

He also has a larger cultural project of combating “ironoia”. I wasn't persuaded that he had either adequately diagnosed a problem or offered a good solution. First, his contention that irony, especially internet irony culture, is motivated by a fear of things struck me as extremely dubious. It seems to me that irony is often more about social positioning – it supplies you with an all-purpose “smart seeming” take that doesn't put you at risk of having the wrong taste or opinion because your true position (if you have one) is obscured. That it distances you from actually engaging with things is a side-effect, not the goal. The sense that other other people are motivated by fear can so easily be a self-serving attempt to make a speaker seem brave by comparison that we ought to be skeptical of claims of that sort, and Bogost doesn't make an especially strong case to overcome that skepticism. Since I found his foundation so shaky I had a difficult time following many of his arguments that built on it, most of them stuck me as rhetorical rather than substantive.

Second, while he lands some good shots (it is a bit egocentric to evaluate your relationship to everything through the lens of how it makes you feel) they felt haphazard to me, like they were more about posturing than making a comprehensive case for his worldview or against the ones he criticizes. Maybe this points out a flaw in the worldview he advocates – if he's just playing with public philosophy by seeing how the joints move when he pushes on things then there's no guarantee that he'll make the machine move in a way accomplishes anything except witnessing the machine move.

Overall Assessment

I can't recommend this book. Perhaps others would get more out of the philosophizing than I did, or be less turned off by writing that's emanating from within a cultural bubble, but it seems to me that everything worthwhile about this book could be gotten more effectively somewhere else. Maybe “playground” is a better term than “magic circle”? But if it is it's not so obviously better that the switching costs seem warranted. The idea that the world should be treated as something to be engaged with rather than escaped or endured seems like a worthwhile idea to me, and worthy of contemplating in more depth, but I'd rather see a more robust and compelling case made for it.