77 Quotes by Ian Bogost

My daughter showed us the key: misery gives way to fun when you take an object, event, situation, or scenario that wasn't designed for you, that isn't invested in you, that isn't concerned in the slightest for your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were. ...this is what play means.

By manipulating the physical configuration of [any situation], you make it produce a subset of the infinite pattern of [possibilities]. And even if you don't know how to play [above situation], you can still play with it.

Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.

When I get data back from a polling experiment, I look at it as a legitimate experiment in public policy, ... The idea is to make games that have an agenda. I'm trying to advance people, not as an entertainment form but as a social commentary.

You may be in Georgia thinking, 'Gee, I wonder how soccer moms in Kansas feel about that issue,'

I've always had a complicated relationship with advertising. It's everywhere, and it's becoming more and more parasitic. Yet, because it's everywhere it has the power to influence people positively as well as negatively.

People don't have to pay right now anyway, ... But, of course, I hope there is a future for my games where people would spend money.

Advertisers, governments and organizations mount huge campaigns to show us what they want us to see, and we want to expose what they're hiding. There's lots of precedent for this sort of speech in print, in film (and) on the Web, but we think videogames are particularly good at exposing the underlying logics of these organizations--how they work and what's wrong with it.

This isn't a game that changes your opinion, but tells you why people have the opinion they do.