I’m continuing to read
Ian Bogost’s Play Anything while I wait for my car to get inspected, which I’m finally doing. He has an appealing premise: that you should look for opportunities for play in anything, especially mundane and traditionally boring situations. The second chapter is about “ironoia”, his term for a defensive dressing of actions that allows the actor to hedge between sincerity and insincerity. That’s definitely something people do.
However, this is an example he gives of ironoia (apologies for the hilarious OCR capitalization):
A WHILE BACK, a game designer friend of mine named Phil Fish
made a Plea on Twitter, “Hey bloggers, no more ‘blank rebuilt in
Min e craft, postS, please. We get it. You can make things in Minecraft.
Thanks,” Fish was referring to the popular online game Minecraft, in
which players hunt for resources that are used to construct models
and apparatuses with the game’s characteristic, cubical Visual style.
The Internet being what it is, given such tools extreme fans do insane
Mugs, like elaborately reconstructing the city King’s Landing from
Game of Thrones using nothing but this square matter mined from
Minecraft.
Seeing Fish’s tweet, an enterprising ironoiac recreated the form of
the embedded tweet itself inside Minecraft, a fact that the tech blog
VentureBeat then dutifully blogged about, thus completing not one
but two cycles of an ironoia self-treatment the environmental philoso-
pher Timothy Morton names “anything you can do I can do meta.”
Making that tweet in Minecraft isn’t hedging. They made that, and they clearly mean it’s good and brings them joy.
It’s also exactly what Bogost says you should do with an unpleasant or boring situation. OK, crusty Phil Fish told you to shut up about the things you like. Should you just curl and feel sad? No, Bogost (usually) recommends you find something new and novel about the situation. Incorporate Phil Fish’s admonishment into your fun.
I’m curious to find out if he explains more about this. Also, whether he acknowledged that playing is sometimes tiring and not fun, or if he defines that as not actually being play.
I’m continuing to read Ian Bogost’s Play Anything while I wait for my car to get inspected, which I’m finally doing. He has an appealing premise: that you should look for opportunities for play in anything, especially mundane and traditionally boring situations. The second chapter is about “ironoia”, his term for a defensive dressing of actions that allows the actor to hedge between sincerity and insincerity. That’s definitely something people do.