"The gold standard of our culture is 'fun.' Companies want their offices to feel more playful, schools want learning to be entertaining, programmers want their products to feel as intuitive and addictive as playing Tetris or AngryBirds. Trying to make life like playing a game sounds like a good idea--who doesn't want to have fun while working or commuting, parenting or cleaning?--but what's often overlooked in the rush to make everything 'fun' is that games are hard. Playing a sport requires concentration, repetition, and physical pain; playing a musical instrument demands shockingly boring practice and patience; even playing video games requires hours and hours of study, determination, and drive. Making our ideas about 'play' sound a whole lot like 'work.' Where's the fun in that? In Play Anything, Ian Bogost--the Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology--shows that our common understanding of games--that they are always fun, and always juvenile--is dead wrong. And that that's a good thing, both for how we play and how we conduct our days"--