A final conclusion that I’d like to make about Play Anything is that it really speaks to the human experience in a way that applies to so much more than video games. I used examples from games, because I liked relating it to that, but this book opened up ideas about real life applications of play and how we can use that to essentially restructure the way we think and view life.

Previously, I mentioned the word playground, which I have yet to define but it is something that is very essential to the idea of play. “A playground is a place where play takes place, and play is a practice of manipulating the things that you happen to find in a playground.” (21) This then leads him to assert that a playground is not really something we create, it’s something that is always there and we have to discover. So when his daughter starts to skip cracks in the mall, it’s not really that she has created the space but the space was always there to be a playground from the beginning. The cracks of the mall existed already, and they could either be viewed as ordinary or something to engage in play. Either way, we are walking up to these structures and choosing to see the playgrounds that are already edged within them.

So, it’s easy to see how maybe we can make use of playgrounds in our everyday life to take advantage of their potential for us to engage in play. But there are forces as well in life that work against playgrounds, which he defines as irony. Bogost suggests that irony has become heavily prevalent in our current time and this is because we use irony as a way to cope, instead of using play. He points out that irony puts a “buffer atop the real world that protects us from risk” (35). I think there’s truth in irony being used as a way for us to escape the woes of our existence. In my view, irony feels like a product of existentialist crisis. How do we take the world for what it is and embrace it, therefore seeing the playgrounds within the structures around us, when we feel either disconnected, uncomfortable, or uncertain with our meaning of existence? Bogost similarly says, “We still want to fashion the playgrounds of that would lead us to novel experience. But we’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t or we shouldn’t. That it’s not worthwhile to embrace things for what it is or that it is worthwhile but ultimately futile” (41).

In summary, Bogost seems to be not only opening up the definition of play, but addressing the way we can choose to view the world around us. Playgrounds are engrained in structure, but we are more inclined to live in irony and that will mostly prevent us from discovering playgrounds. It feels to me like a much more positive outlook on the way we can interact with our environment is in the idea of play. We exist in these structures that are in many ways of out of control, so how is it that we are going to combat the existential dread this is bound to cause? We can choose to alleviate it, by covering the world in irony, so that way we can avoid all pain, but with this there will always be tension between us and such structures. Or, we can choose to play inside of them, in ways retreating back to our childhood, discovering the playgrounds life has to offer make our daily life much more enjoyable.