Gaming’s Toughest Critic Wants You to Live a Happier Life

Today’s episode might make some listeners a little grumpy. After all, my guest — author, game designer, and philosopher Ian Bogost — isn’t afraid to make claims like this one about the early-2010’s video game boom

“ I didn’t love the quality of the conversations that I was able to have about games and art in the games community at that time. They felt unsophisticated and, I started to feel like, Wow, this whole, this whole world of game people is just Philistines. They’re not interested in anything. They don’t know about anything.”

But while Bogost is one of gaming’s toughest critics, he’s also a passionate evangelist of the fundamental human experience of play. And with his new book, The Small Stuff, he dives deeper into sensorial pleasure. His guidance could help you reclaim some of the pleasures in life that have been removed, in large part, by tech companies that have replaced the sensual pleasures of life with frictionless, joyless apps.

So, this week, I encourage you to approach the interview with an open mind. Resist reacting. Maybe grab some bubble wrap to pop, to trigger some pleasurable chemical reactions in your brain. Because, as Bogost pre-emptively warns, “People who are interested in games have too much of their identities bound up with their interest in games compared to almost anything else that I’ve encountered.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s wrong. But Ian Bogost is always reliable for starting an interesting conversation.

• Act 1: A Life Making Sense of Games

• Act 2: The Pleasure in Noticing the Small Things

• Patreon Bonus: Behind-the-Scenes of Grand Theft Auto’s Press Events

• Bonus: An Excerpt from “The Small Stuff” Audiobook

• Ian Bogost: Game designer, essayist, professor, and author of “The Small Stuff”

• Closing Song: “The Path of the Wind (from My Neighbor Totoro)” performed by Gentle Love

Early access to ad-free episodes, weekly bonus segments, and monthly bonus episodes, including monthly episodes of Past Games, where experts share the histories of beloved games.

Now live: The History of the Original Tomb Raider!

• The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (Simon & Schuster)

• Why Anything but Games Matters (Game Developer)

• Persuasive Games (Wiki)

• ‘Advergames’: how games platform Roblox became a corporate marketing playground (The Guardian)

• Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game (Electronic Book Review)

• Movie marketers compete in ‘advergames’ (Variety)

• Public Thinker: Ian Bogost on Games, Doorknobs, and General Readers (Public Books)

• How to Write about Videogames (Public Books)

• Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press)

• Cow Clicker (Wiki)

• The End of Manual Transmission (The Atlantic)

• Video Games Are Better Without Stories (The Atlantic)

• Video Games Are Better Without Characters (The Atlantic)

• In The Shadow of the Holodeck (Charles J Pratt)

• How to Be an Alien: Ian Bogost’s “Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing” (LA Review of Books)

• Visualization: A Weird Experience With Beaterator (Kotaku)

• Grand Theft Auto 5 review: golden years (Polygon)

• Grand Theft Auto 5 - Review (Polygon/YouTube)

• New ‘Grand Theft Auto’ finds new ways to outrage critics (CNBC)

• Grand Theft Auto V Is a Return to the Comedy of Violence (NYTimes)

• Opinion: The secret reason so many people love Grand Theft Auto (Polygon)

• Red Dead Redemption 2 review (Polygon)

• The Making of Red Dead Redemption 2 (NYMag)

From the album Prescription for Sleep: Ghibli, now available for pre-order

• Here’s a link to the full audiobook: https://bit.ly/3TDKKNG

• Copyright © 2026 by Ian Bogost. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio read by Sean Patrick Hopkins, from the audiobook The Small Stuff by Ian Bogost, published by Simon & Schuster Audio, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon & Schuster, LLC.

• Shigeru Miyamoto x Kenji Eno (1996) (shmuplations)

• It’s everywhere: Rape culture, Cyberpunk 2077, and would-be Senators (Mothership)

• ASSASSIN’S CREED BLACK FLAG RESYNCED REVIEW (PC Gamer)

• 47 revelatory hours with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced (Game File)

• Did We Finally Figure Out Video Game Movies? | Mike Drucker | (Sam Brown University TV)

• If The Odyssey film is anything like The Odyssey adventure game from 2012, Matt Damon will spend the entire first hour trying to solve a single loom puzzle (PCGamer)

• “There are no benefits to being owned by Microsoft”: Xbox owners accused of cultivating a “disposable worker mentality” in damning report on layoffs (RPS)

From the summary: “Short experimental 3D game collection about sexuality and masculinity. Spanking, sucking, driving, showering.” (Steam)

• Sam Neill on ‘New Zealand Cinema’ (filmSCHOOLarchive/YouTube)

• The Simple Genius of Jon Klassen (The New Yorker)

• ‘Citizen Vigilante’ Is The Latest Product Of The Culture Of Petulance (Defector)