This past spring my wife and I drove out to Long Island to see her family. On this trip my sister and her wife joined in the car to attend a party for a college friend happening nearby. My sister and I share the car, which means that all four of us share the car. We travel together a lot on trips that can involve 4+ hours of driving/being trapped in a car, so an hour and a half out on Long Island seemed like nothing. Regrettably, that day we were all kind of testy and antsy (we were going to a baby shower for my brother-in-law and his wife who were expecting the first nibling of the family, VERY EXCITING!) and inevitably there was traffic on the LIE. As tension in the car was rising my wife did something she had never done before – she suggested we play an alphabet game that she had played on car rides as a child. The rules were simple: you scanned the passing surroundings and called out when a word on a sign/car/billboard started with the letter of the alphabet we were on. Bogost said “play invites and even requires greater attention, generosity, respect, and investment than its supposedly more serious alternatives do” (4). I have made this drive to Long Island a hundred times. It’s always boring, there’s almost always traffic, and we’re always mad about it. But actually surrendering ourselves to the situation and making a game out if it completely transformed our drive. All of the sudden, we went from being miserable and angry to actively engaging with each other and even observing our surroundings. It made the ride go by faster and being stuck in traffic actually gave us more opportunities to find what we were looking for. Rather than being stressed, frustrated, and angry about something we had no control over (traffic), we were able to play and even have fun together.

I try to surrender myself to things I cannot control, but as seen above I am a work in progress. When Bogost writes “adults also don’t live in a world designed for us” and “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 with your experience of it, and then treat it as if it were” (3) it highlights all of the potential sites of play in everyday life if we can find them. Bogost later argues that play isn’t the goal, but the tool (12). To Bogost anything and everything can be play. I like the idea of thinking of play this way, its something I am using to entertain myself, not the thing entertaining me. Does this mean that there is possibility for play in something as mundane as packing the car for a vacation or going grocery shopping? Of course once I think about this I know its true. For example I hate the grocery store, but I hate cooking more, so I grocery shop and my wife cooks. The boundaries and contents are my budget, what we need for the week, and what is available in the store – voila! I think looking at it this way allows you to not fall into the David Foster Wallace trap where you have to somehow find empathy in every interaction in order to get through life. Maybe dodging other shoppers is a little bit more like Frogger than an exercise in imagining what is happening in the personal lives of the surrounding shoppers. To go into the other example, my wife loves the Tetris like challenge of packing the car for a long trip. As mentioned, I travel with an entourage, which typically means the trunk of our car is stuffed to the brim with duffle bags, suitcases, food, drinks, bags of board games, etc. In this case the boundaries and contents are the physical space available in the car and how to fit all of our stuff while still ideally being able to see a sliver of the rear window through the rearview mirror. These everyday instances of play do help ease the stress and mundanity of day to day life in late stage capitalism. I have found myself thinking a lot about this piece in the time since I finished it and how play can be freeing in a world where it feels like I’m always doing something I don’t want to.