We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?

Normally if you're dating, you're looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, "Well, swipe left on that, let's just keep looking." In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It's just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change.

When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.

Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.

A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.

If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.

If you think of play as being in things, there are things that are playable, then it becomes the work of figuring out what a thing can do.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.