IO

The Magic Circle

“The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. ” (in: Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, p. 107)

"Somehow we got the idea that fun refers to enjoyment, and that games offer us special access to that enjoyment. But games and fun are not connected because games are already intrinsically entertaining or enjoyable, but because games are already intimately associated with playgrounds. Games are experiences we encounter through play.
Play is the act of manipulating something that doesn’t dictate all of its capacities in advance, but that limits its capacities through focus and exclusion. [...] Play is everywhere, in anything we can operate." (in: Play Anything, Ian Bogost, p. 92)

“[advanced speed of browsers] encouraged me to continue the development. Along the way I was also labeled as "insane" for working on this project by a good friend of mine, which only made me further step up my efforts - when people call you insane you know you've hit on something interesting!” (in: Data Science Weekly, Andrej Karpathy)

"Even if play produces fun, the basic experience of play is not letting loose or doing whatever you want, but carefully and deliberately working with the materials one finds in a situation. Play is not only fun, not only a child’s activity, but also exploring the free movement present in a system of any kind, where system might refer to a social situation as much as a machine assembly. [...] Thinking worldfully, it is better to think of play as a condition of the universe rather than a human activity - everything is 'at play.' ” (in: Play Anything, Ian Bogost, p. 113)

"It's like gaming sometimes, trying to guide it. There's some very basic AI in there—I mean only using "if" statements, conditionals, if-the-situation-is-this-then-do-that type things. It's as basic as a game AI, if you look at the AI for the characters in a game, it's just a chain of "if" statements, basically. It's very much on a level to that, really. So playing music on it is about as fun as playing Grand Theft Auto, doing random shit with pedestrians, seeing if you can get someone to run up a wall or whatever. If I can get the musical equivalent of that, I'm generally quite happy." (in: Autechre interview: Joe Muggs goes deep with the seminal Warp Records duo, Sean Booth)