In Ian Bogost’s Play Anything, he dissects the nature of games and how they play a role in our everyday lives. Games to Bogost is not limited to the typical games, to video games or board games. He opens up the first chapter talking about his daughter who started to play an impromptu game of not stepping on the cracks as she walked in a mall. This is how he shows that when he talks about the idea of play, he is talking about a range of play, and his main points in this introduction largely are on how play stems from human nature, making it an integral part of how we can interact with the world. 

“Play bores through boredom in order to reach the deep truth of ordinary things,” he states in the preface. (4) He asserts in this that play is sparked from boredom, it’s how we take an ordinary, boring environment and transform it into a playground. Just looking at video games alone, for me, it’s easy to see how I fill up the spaces of boredom in my day with video games. I think an even larger point though is not just the allocated downtimes of boredom being able to spark play, but the fact that on the surface the world around us can be kind of boring. This feels like a nihilistic take, but it’s not exactly a negative thing to say that the world is full of mundane things that we have to turn into something that is fun. For example, grocery shopping is more of a necessary thing we have to do, it’s not exactly fun or exciting, but what Bogost argues is that even in spaces like the grocery store there is room for play. As a kid, the grocery store was a challenging place to play a game of ispy, with the person only ever saying they spy a color and there inevitably being a lot of different colors in there. So he actually is suggesting to view these places in a way kids view them, as an adult the idea of play maybe shifting from playing Ispy to playing the game of hopping from one checkout line to the other to see which one is moving the fastest. It’s viewing simple actions like that as play, that can shift the whole environment and therefore, our mood about the experience. 

He starts to sum up his argument on play in chapter one by saying, “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.” (11) It’s like viewing the world as a blank slate, where we can give to it whatever we want, and a way we can interact with it is through play. To go back to traditional games, I think that’s why at the core of many games are human drives and emotion. Like how monopoly largely plays on greed and replicates capitalistic idealisms, or Call of Duty plays on the competitive drive to be more virtually agile than the other opponents. Games provide a space that replicates our world, while allowing us to freely move around in it through our own drives and instincts with little real life consequence. This, in turn, helps us to actually navigate our reality, our place and meaning in the world. There’s a lot that we can learn about ourselves from the way we interact with games, and I think that is because of the fact that games are just a form of play, and play, as Bogost suggests, is a natural circumstance of our humanity.