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 …

So building off my previous sentiment that play is about having fun inside of a structure, I think this naturally brings one to question the definition of fun. In Chapter three, which is all about the idea of fun, Bogost starts off by saying that as humans we have a misconceived idea of fun. We tend to overuse the word, to the point where it can feel devoid of true meaning. Through starting to analyze what causes this trivial meaning of fun, Bogost introduces a paradoxical definition of what fun actually is, something that “comes from the ordinary and the …

Learning about post-structuralism theorists in class opened up a way of thinking of the world in a mindset of seeing the invisible structures that are in place around us. This is a similar thing that Bogost also does in Play Anything, particularly in the first chapter where he starts to establish the idea of play existing as a way for us to maneuver and appreciate being inside a structure. It feels like it can be interpreted that play is like a coping mechanism, a response to the structures that encompass us. In the first chapter, Bogost writes, “Games aren’t magic …

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 …