2016 Reading #62
Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games by Ian Bogost
Play Anything gives an early shout-out to Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, and in many ways this book is a reply to McGonigal's line of thought. Bogost's viewpoint is that reality is just fine the way it is, but applying the idea of play to it helps you sort through how reality works and make the most of the options it offers. To Bogost, play is a response to the environment that helps you decipher and control it.
That's an interesting and occasionally useful viewpoint, but -- like McGonigal -- Bogost takes his ideas too far. In his eyes, play is an all-purpose coping tool and a fundamental way of apprehending reality. It's a big philosophical hammer and everything is the nail. That's a lovely fantasy for us professional game designer types, but vastly overstates the value of play.
Bogost acknowledges but never refutes a more conventional theory: that play is how we practice the skills of studying and manipulating the world around us. We can learn skills from play, but we don't have to draw a magic circle and play to apply what we've learned. The grandiose claims that Bogost makes for using play as a primary method of interacting with reality seem awkward and contrived when compared to the clean lines of practicing mindfulness or stoicism.
That doesn't mean that Play Anything isn't a worthwhile challenge to some of our conventional ideas about play and perception. But I found myself considering Bogost's ideas without being convinced by them.