a more powerful aim is to develop a new medium for thought. A medium such as, say, Adobe Illustrator is essentially different from any of the individual tools Illustrator contains. Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.

Memory systems make memory into a choice, rather than an event left up to chance: This changes the relationship to what we're learning, reduces worry, and frees up attention to focus on other kinds of learning, including conceptual, problem-solving, and creative.

Memory systems can be used to build genuine conceptual understanding, not just learn facts: In Quantum Country we achieve this in part through the aspiration to virtuoso card writing, and in part through a narrative embedding of spaced repetition that gradually builds context and understanding.

Mnemonic techniques such as memory palaces are great, but not versatile enough to build genuine conceptual understanding: Such techniques are very specialized, and emphasize artificial connections, not the inherent connections present in much conceptual knowledge. The mnemonic techniques are, however, useful for bootstrapping knowledge with an ad hoc structure.

What practices would lead to tools for thought as transformative as Hindu-Arabic numerals? And in what ways does modern design practice and tech industry product practice fall short? To be successful, you need an insight-through-making loop to be operating at full throttle, combining the best of deep research culture with the best of Silicon Valley product culture.

Historically, work on tools for thought has focused principally on cognition; much of the work has been stuck in Spock-space. But it should take emotion as seriously as the best musicians, movie directors, and video game designers. Mnemonic video is a promising vehicle for such explorations, possibly combining both deep emotional connection with the detailed intellectual mastery the mnemonic medium aspires toward.

It's striking to contrast conventional technical books with the possibilities enabled by executable books. You can imagine starting an executable book with, say, quantum teleportation, right on the first page. You'd provide an interface – perhaps a library is imported – that would let users teleport quantum systems immediately. They could experiment with different parts of the quantum teleportation protocol, illustrating immediately the most striking ideas about it. The user wouldn't necessarily understand all that was going on. But they'd begin to internalize an accurate picture of the meaning of teleportation. And over time, at leisure, the author could unpack some of what might a priori seem to be the drier details. Except by that point the reader will be bought into those details, and they won't be so dry

Aspiring to canonicity, one fun project would be to take the most recent IPCC climate assessment report (perhaps starting with a small part), and develop a version which is executable. Instead of a report full of assertions and references, you'd have a live climate model – actually, many interrelated models – for people to explore. If it was good enough, people would teach classes from it; if it was really superb, not only would they teach classes from it, it could perhaps become the creative working environment for many climate scientists.

In serious mediums, there's a notion of canonical media. By this, we mean instances of the medium that expand its range, and set a new standard widely known amongst creators in that medium. For instance, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and 2001 all expanded the range of film, and inspired later film makers. It's also true in new media. YouTubers like Grant Sanderson have created canonical videos: they expand the range of what people think is possible in the video form. And something like the Feynman Lectures on Physics does it for textbooks. In each case one gets the sense of people deeply committed to what they're doing. In many of his lectures it's obvious that Feynman isn't just educating: he's reporting the results of a lifelong personal obsession with understanding how the world works. It's thrilling, and it expands the form.

There's a general principle here: good tools for thought arise mostly as a byproduct of doing original work on serious problems.

Game companies develop many genuinely new interface ideas. This perhaps seems surprising, since you'd expect such interface ideas to also suffer from the public goods problem: game designers need to invest enormous effort to develop those interface ideas, and they are often immediately copied (and improved on) by other companies, at little cost. In that sense, they are public goods, and enrich the entire video game ecosystem.

Many video games make most of their money from the first few months of sales. While other companies can (and do) come in and copy or riff on any new ideas, it often does little to affect revenue from the original game, which has already made most of its money In fact, cloning is a real issue in gaming, especially in very technically simple games. An example is the game Threes, which took the developers more than a year to make. Much of that time was spent developing beautiful new interface ideas. The resulting game was so simple that clones and near-clones began appearing within days. One near clone, a game called 2048, sparked a mini-craze, and became far more successful than Threes. At the other extreme, some game companies prolong the revenue-generating lifetime of their games with re-releases, long-lived online versions, and so on. This is particularly common for capital-intensive AAA games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series. In such cases the business model relies less on clever new ideas, and more on improved artwork (for re-release), network effects (for online versions), and branding. . While this copying is no doubt irritating for the companies being copied, it's still worth it for them to make the up-front investment.

in gaming, clever new interface ideas can be distinguishing features which become a game's primary advantage in the marketplace. Indeed, new interface ideas may even help games become classics – consider the many original (at the time) ideas in games ranging from Space Invaders to Wolfenstein 3D to Braid to Monument Valley. As a result, rather than underinvesting, many companies make sizeable investments in developing new interface ideas, even though they then become public goods. In this way the video game industry has largely solved the public goods problems.

It's encouraging that the video game industry can make inroads on the public goods problem. Is there a solution for tools for thought? Unfortunately, the novelty-based short-term revenue approach of the game industry doesn't work. You want people to really master the best new tools for thought, developing virtuoso skill, not spend a few dozen hours (as with most games) getting pretty good, and then moving onto something new.

Adobe shares in common with many other software companies that much of their patenting is defensive: they patent ideas so patent trolls cannot sue them for similar ideas. The situation is almost exactly the reverse of what you'd like. Innovative companies can easily be attacked by patent trolls who have made broad and often rather vague claims in a huge portfolio of patents, none of which they've worked out in much detail. But when the innovative companies develop (at much greater cost) and ship a genuinely good new idea, others can often copy the essential core of that idea, while varying it enough to plausibly evade any patent. The patent system is not protecting the right things.

many of the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought do suffer the public goods problem. And that means tech companies focus elsewhere; it means many imaginative and ambitious people decide to focus elsewhere; it means we haven't developed the powerful practices needed to do work in the area, and a result the field is still in a pre-disciplinary stage. The result, ultimately, is that it means the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought are undersupplied.

Culturally, tech is dominated by an engineering, goal-driven mindset. It's much easier to set KPIs, evaluate OKRs, and manage deliverables, when you have a very specific end-goal in mind. And so it's perhaps not surprising that tech culture is much more sympathetic to AGI and BCI as overall programs of work. But historically it's not the case that humanity's biggest breakthroughs have come about in this goal-driven way. The creation of language – the ur tool for thought – is perhaps the most important occurrence of humanity's existence. And although the origin of language is hotly debated and uncertain, it seems extremely unlikely to have been the result of a goal-driven process. It's amusing to try imagining some prehistoric quarterly OKRs leading to the development of language. What sort of goals could one possibly set? Perhaps a quota of new irregular verbs? It's inconceivable!

Even the computer itself came out of an exploration that would be regarded as ridiculously speculative and poorly-defined in tech today. Someone didn't sit down and think “I need to invent the computer”; that's not a thought they had any frame of reference for. Rather, pioneers such as Alan Turing and Alonzo Church were exploring extremely basic and fundamental (and seemingly esoteric) questions about logic, mathematics, and the nature of what is provable. Out of those explorations the idea of a computer emerged, after many years; it was a discovered concept, not a goal.

Fundamental, open-ended questions seem to be at least as good a source of breakthroughs as goals, no matter how ambitious. This is difficult to imagine or convince others of in Silicon Valley's goal-driven culture. Indeed, we ourselves feel the attraction of a goal-driven culture. But empirically open-ended exploration can be just as, or more successful.

There's a lot of work on tools for thought that takes the form of toys, or “educational” environments. Tools for writing that aren't used by actual writers. Tools for mathematics that aren't used by actual mathematicians. And so on. Even though the creators of such tools have good intentions, it's difficult not to be suspicious of this pattern. It's very easy to slip into a cargo cult mode, doing work that seems (say) mathematical, but which actually avoids engagement with the heart of the subject. Often the creators of these toys have not ever done serious original work in the subjects for which they are supposedly building tools. How can they know what needs to be included?

New real-time syncing libraries like Partykit (and my inspired creation playhtml) are making it incredibly easy to make websites multiplayer, which many games incorporate as the default. This prediction is wise in a lot of ways in terms of interaction, narrative, tutorial, and multiplayer design, and more and more people desire a liveness and tactility in websites that we take for granted in video games.

Websites are the future of video games. They are the “end game” of video games. They are spaces where the end players (the website visitors) have the agency to freely interact with others, and not towards any predetermined object, but purely for themselves, discovering who they are in each new environment and finding new ways of relating to one another.

Tokimeki Memorial gives the impression where your agency comes into conflict with several others’, each with their own desires and personalities. At the end of this season, he concludes that more video games should ditch combat mechanics and instead focus on how your choice of actions question and ultimately shape who you are and what you care about.

As I watch Tim talk about all this, I think about how websites feel like multiplayer video games, all of which are part of the broader “internet” universe. One in which the “creatures” are the cursors of other, real people. And where we can’t fight each other at all, only talk to one another.

Somewhere in the push to make the internet the infrastructure of a global capitalist economy, we lost this perspective on what the internet is. If I asked people to define what websites are to them, they might talk about the capabilities they provide: “the world’s information at your fingertips,” “AI that does whatever you ask of it,” “a platform for selling products.” Or as design artifacts: they provide the basis of interactive, creative pieces of art, media, and writing. But if we distill a website down to its base components, it is a space that allows people to talk to each other. In the era when the internet was new and before we had predetermined what it was “for,” everyday internet pioneers found ways to talk to one another by making websites for each other. The conversations spanned webs of personal websites, revealing intimate detail in exchange for intimate detail. They bartered histories for kinship, stories for solidarity, identities for community.

The websites of our modern-day internet experience reflect quite a different perspective on what websites should be “for.” Websites are often the expression of a corporate unit, optimized for flow, retention, or the latest trendy design aesthetic. We focus on animation design and gradient layering rather than the interactions that govern how we relate to one another.

How do we make websites feel more like embodied objects? What does a website that can become well-worn or passed down feel like? How does a website become a living gathering space, one that evolves with the activity of its participants? How can a website enable showing care to each other? How can it facilitate solidarity between people?

As video games have shifted towards hyper-optimization, the internet has gone a similar direction. Friction has been systematically eliminated and sophisticated automated experimentation infrastructure enables optimization of key metrics at a microscopic level of detail. In return, we’ve come to view websites and the broader internet more and more as a purely utilitarian medium. Even social media, which at some point was positioned as something for self-expression and community-making has become almost entirely a space for influence climbing.

We need more websites that gently guide us to trust our own choices and intuitions, that chide us when we try to do it all and work ourselves to the bone, that nudge us to find beauty in unexpected places, to find the poetry in the lazy.

“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”

Aonuma became co-director of “Ocarina,” which revolutionized how game characters move and fight each other in a 3D space. Unlike cinema, video games require audience control of the camera. “Ocarina” created a “camera-locking” system to focus the perspective while you use the controller for character movement. The system, still used by games today, is a large reason “Ocarina” is often compared to the work of Orson Welles, who redefined how cinema was shot.

The “ethos of Zelda” focuses on such new, unexpected concepts of play — even as many other modern games prioritize story, like TV and film do. With “Tears,” at “the beginning of development, there really isn’t a story,” Fujibayashi said. “Once we got to the point where we felt confident in the gameplay experience, that’s when the story starts to emerge.”

Duolingo had already implemented several gamification mechanics successfully, such as the progression system on the home screen, streaks, and an achievements system. And second, top digital games at the time had much higher retention rates than our product, which I took as evidence that we hadn’t yet reached the ceiling for gamification’s impact.

The moves counter allowed users only a finite number of moves to complete a level, which added a sense of scarcity and urgency to the gameplay. We decided to incorporate the counter mechanic into our product. We gave our users a finite number of chances to answer questions correctly before they had to start the lesson over.

Depressingly, the result of all that effort was completely neutral. No change to our retention. No increase in DAU. We hardly got any user feedback at all.

When you are playing Gardenscapes, each move feels like a strategic decision, because you have to outmaneuver dynamic obstacles to find a path to victory. But strategic decision-making isn’t required to complete a Duolingo lesson—you mostly either know the answer to a question or you don’t. Because there wasn’t any strategy to it, the Duolingo moves counter was simply a boring, tacked-on nuisance. It was the wrong gamification mechanic to adopt into Duolingo. I realized that I had been so focused on the similarities between Gardenscapes and Duolingo that I had failed to account for the importance of the underlying differences.

Referrals work for Uber because riders are paying for rides on a never-ending pay-as-you-go system. A free ride is a constant incentive. For Duolingo, we were trying to incentivize users by offering a free month of Super Duolingo. However, our best and most active users already had Super Duolingo, and we couldn’t give them a free month when they were already in a plan. This meant that our strategy, which needed to rely on our best users, actually excluded them.

Now when looking to adopt a feature, I ask myself:Why is this feature working in that product?Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context, i.e. will it translate well?What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?

Our failure with the Gardenscapes-style moves counter hadn’t actually disproved any of the original reasons why we believed gamification still had upside for Duolingo—we had only learned that the moves counter was a clumsy attempt at it. This time, we would be more methodical and intelligent about features we added or borrowed.

We deliberately made our leaderboard as casual and frictionless as possible; users were automatically opted in and could progress to the top of the first league by merely engaging consistently in their regular language study. By keeping the game mechanic exciting, but making it simpler than in FarmVille 2, we felt like we had struck the right balance of adopting and adapting.

point systems often don’t measure what we want to measure. They artificially simplify or distort our values. Our goals are messy. They’re strange and complex and multifaceted, but then they are collapsed down to scoring systems. And the thing that can happen here is we lose sight of what we wanted and we begin to want what the point system wants

We are being changed by point systems and structures that we’re not taught to see, that often have incentives and logics that are hidden from us

when you quantify in an institution— and I want to stress here, this is not about quantification in any circumstance, right— this is about quantification in bureaucracies and institutions— what you do is you kind of take really context-sensitive nuanced information that requires a lot of background to understand and then you carve out all of the subtle nuance and all the weird little information that needs a lot of shared context to understand.

So in order to make that information travel well, I need to create this neat little informational packet where I strip off all of the weird context-sensitive stuff and just create something simple. In this case, I rank each student inside a pre-established spectrum— F to A. And that information, right, is totally comprehensible to anyone. It aggregates easily. Everyone collects it in the same way. It’s been standardized. It mounts up.So if you have large-scale bureaucracies that need to be organized and function coherently, then you need these kind of simple, nuance-free packets of information. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen this constant rise of simplified metrical analysis.

He says, large-scale states can only see the kinds of information they can process. And the kinds of information they can process are things like this— standardized, quantified information.So he thinks that only the parts of the world that are legible to the state, that are put in the terms a state can understand, that’s the only kind of thing the state can process, act on, and see. And so the state wants to transform the world into the kinds of things it can work on. The state can’t see my individual feedback about my students, about you know, what they need for their emotional arc. It can see the letter grade average of the university.

If our taste and our values and our interests are varying and wide, and plural and rich, the state can’t see that. The state can’t get a handle on my bizarre taste in the tabletop role-playing games.

one thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you to stop seeing anything they can’t measure.

Fitbit can capture steps but it can’t capture your joy and ecstasy and physical emotion. If I exercise and I don’t use any objective measures, then I could just be fooling myself. But if I become obsessed with objective measures, then I’m not going to exercise for any of the things that fall outside those objective measures, like the aesthetic joy of movement.

you can track anything. But at some point, the tracking becomes the point.

People who write about games as an art form, as something special, really get super excited by two kinds of games. One are games like Romero’s game “Train,” because it’s so obviously meaningful and ethically potent. And they get really excited about games that tell stories in ways that are familiar to us from movies and novels.

I’m actually a little worried that this kind of focus loses for us something that’s really special about games. It pushes us towards the kind of games that are familiar to us. Those of us that care about art and have read about the theory of fiction or the— that kind of thing we can recognize. Things like the beauty of a really good puzzle game, or the beauty of rock climbing, or the beauty of chess— those are more alien and that’s the thing that I want to understand.

every art form is a crystallization of some common sense experience. That the visual arts are the crystallization of seeing. That music is a crystallization of hearing. And you argue that games are the crystallization of doing.

when you’re playing a game, you’re trying to get some end state. Like if you’re running a marathon, you’re trying to get to a particular point in space. But we don’t actually care about being at that point in space in and of itself, or we would take the easy way. We would take a lift, take an Uber, take a shortcut.

what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have. So the punchline in the book is that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency itself.

What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you, an alternate agent, describing the skeleton of that agent, saying here are the abilities you have, here’s what you’re going to care about.

In the same way that I think we understand some of the art forms as making our senses more acute and our perception of the world more sensitive, games can do that for the way we see the goals and means we adopt in the course of a day.

The thing that was in philosophy that was so delightful and pleasurable quickly and now I have to struggle for four years to get another interesting epiphany. “Baba Is You” is just like epiphany after epiphany after epiphany. You play it for 20 minutes. You solve a level. You had another epiphany. It takes that pleasure and it extracts it and concentrates it.

In the world, our goals and our abilities and the world— a lot of the times they don’t align. You do what you want. And to get what you want, you have to do something incredibly boring and repetitive. Or you face problems that are way beyond you.But in games, because the game designer manipulates what you want to do and the abilities and the obstacles, the game designer can create harmonious action. They can create these possibilities where you’re— what you need to do— the obstacles you face and your abilities just match perfectly. So this is the weird sense in which I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring.And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action. For me, solving puzzles, or balancing over in a rock climb, or seeing a trap ahead in chess, this is ecstasy. And it’s an ecstasy I get once in a while in my non-game life. But game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again.

they are taking what reality is, which is we are constantly opting into these different systems with incentives, and structures, and our skills, and they have to match the means to get to a goal, and distilling that down to a small core.

I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of just craving and wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how well it’s measured.

So when you play chess, you get really sucked into this kind of agency where you are thinking ahead and calculating linearly. When you play diplomacy, you get sucked into this agency where you’re constantly thinking about how you can lie to people and misrepresent yourself. And when you play rock climbing, you get sucked into an agency where all your powers are about balance and fine precision and motion.

the body of games is a kind of library of agencies. The real promise of games, if you take them seriously, is that by playing a ton of them, you can traverse all the different possibilities of agency

The

The biggest danger that I’m worried about for games is if you spend your life playing games, you’ll expect that value systems will be crisp, clear, well-defined, and quantified. And then you leave games, you’ll start looking around for— I don’t know— things to do, or institutions to be a part of, or jobs to do where the outcomes are clear, crystallized, quantified, and shared between people. I’m worried about getting stuck in the world of maximizing your clicks or Wall Street finance just because you have an expectation that what it is to act in the world is to act for clear externally well-defined points.

What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points. And you will begin to adopt that approach and begin to adopt those values without even realizing it. You’ll become habituated. The game will change you. That is a second principle I want to put out here— that games change us.

“Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game. Twitter scores our conversation. And it does so not in terms of our own particular and rich purposes for communication, but in terms of its own preloaded, painfully-thin metrics— likes, retweets, and follower counts. And if we take up Twitter’s invitation and internalize those evaluations, we’ll be thinning out and simplifying our own goals for communication.”

you can care about all kinds of things going on on Twitter. You can care about having fun. You can care about connecting with a few people. You can care about getting knowledge. You can care about getting understanding. You can care about connecting.But those things aren’t measured by Twitter. What Twitter measures is who clicked like, who clicked retweet, who clicked follow. And what you might think is, oh, because people click like, then that’s just a good proxy for all these other values. They’re only going click like if you actually successfully communicated something. But clicking like is a really narrow information capture.

So I think if you look at what a lot of people in politics and media think they’re doing on Twitter, they are writing things that on their face are meant to be persuasive. A gloss on a news article. A tweet about democracy, or single payer health care, or how Joe Biden is bad, or whatever it might be. But that tweet is then attached to a scoring system that has nothing to do with whether or not you are persuasive to the people you need to convince. It’s whether or not that tweet is applauded by the people who already like you.

These little worlds where every mechanism is something you can internalize, and you can make a plan that encompasses every single mechanism the game has and it all fits.

When you read people who are excited about a conspiracy theory— like the flat earth conspiracy theory— one of the things they say over and over again is they felt so disempowered before the conspiracy theory. And once they became a flat-earther, or something like this, they felt empowered. And the reason, I think, is the conspiracy theories fit inside your head. They’re the right size for you just like games are the right size for you to take some kind of action.

If you believe in a conspiracy theory, now you have total intellectual agency. You don’t have to trust other people. You don’t have to do this awkward weird thing of trusting somebody and trusting who they trust and then trusting all the million things— people they trust. You can think everything through yourself and then come to a conclusion using this engine that’s so powerful that lets you explain anything.

Games are exciting when they test us and they put us right at the limit of our abilities. And then we push through and then we can make it. The games are beautiful when our whole practical self fits the challenge.

So if you expect someone to make a game out of intellectual life, you shouldn’t expect them to make something so complicated that you have to do this horrible trusting thing. And you shouldn’t expect them to make it easy. You should expect them to make it so challenging that it really fully engages people. But it’s just the right size, so if they fight hard, they can actually find explanation for everything.

one of the difficult things about being alive during, as you put it, the great endarkenment, is we are all choosing which explanations to believe, built to some degree on structures of social trust, not a first person verification. We can’t verify a lot of what we believe we know about the world.

how do you develop a sensitivity— not a cynicism and maybe not even always a skepticism, but just first a sensitivity to being able to see all the different game-like scored, simplifying systems that you’ve adopted and all of the values they are pushing you towards? How do you develop game mindfulness?

I’m trying to develop the same kind of instinct in belief systems. Someone hands you a belief system and you’re like, oh, this feels so good. That’s— and then you have to pause and be like, wait, is this designed just to make me feel good? So the short answer is I’m now suspicious of pleasure, which I hate.

thinking about games shows me two possibilities that are like two flip sides of the same coin. And the richness of games is when temporary hyper-focus on a goal opens up all this rich, sculpted, interesting activity, all these amazing movements, or decisions, or calculations that are just lovely. That’s the promise of games.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAnd the danger of games and the game-like attitude is when we hyper-focus on that goal and we forget about all the other stuff that could happen along the way. And we just narrowly see the goal. And like, games for me are good when you engage in a duality of experience of them. You spend some time buried and trying to win, but you realize that winning isn’t the point. And then you step back and you see, oh my god, the process of doing it was so rich and so lovely.And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. We never think about what follows from it. The big worry with the impact of highly gamified external systems is it encourages us not to step into a game and step back from it and think about the richness of the activity and whether it was worth it. What I’m worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you don’t see any of the other stuff.

One of the most engaging aspects in the storytelling of The Last of Us is that, because Joel dictates how you move forward in the game, you’re implicated in his increasingly gray decision-making. On TV, the viewer is primed to be sympathetic toward a main character, so there’s not the same level of friction as experienced by the gamer. Story lines that feel alive as an active participant in the game instead feel hackneyed on television. Watching The Last of Us, I wanted to pick it up and shake it free from its preconceptions about what it has to do in order to be faithful to its source material and what it wants to do in order to be taken seriously as television. As a series, it says nothing new in either case.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.

The Staunton pieces broadly resemble columns with a wide molded base. Knights feature the sculpted head and neck of a horse. Kings, the tallest pieces, top the column with a stylised crown topped with a cross pattée. Queens are slightly smaller than kings, and feature a coronet topped with a tiny ball (a monde). Rooks feature stylised crenellated battlements and bishops a Western-style mitre. Pawns are the smallest and are topped by a plain ball. Pieces representing human characters (the king, queen, bishop, and pawn) have a flat disk separating the body from the head design, which is known as a collar.

The industrial designers talked about contours that felt gratifying in the hand and actions that provided a fidget-like comfort such as flipping the lid of a Zippo lighter or the satisfying click of a pen.

In video games, the button you press to make a character jump is often a simple binary input (pressed or not), and yet the output combines a very finely-tuned choreography of interactions, animations, sounds, particles, and camera shake to create a rich composition of sensations. The same jump button can feel like a dainty hop or a powerful leap. “Game feel” (a.k.a. “juice”) is the “aesthetic sensation of control” (Steve Swink, Game Feel) you have when playing a game.

The difference comes down to choice—which is to say, Design (with a capital “D”). Game feel is what makes some games feel gratifying to play (a character gliding down a sand dune) and others feel frustrating (sticky jumping, sliding). These decisions become a signature part of a game’s aesthetic feel and gameplay.

The Browser Company has written that software can optimize for emotional needs rather than just functional needs. Jason Yuan has promoted the idea of “fidgetability” where, similar to a key fob or lighter, digital actions can be designed to feel satisfying. Rahul Vohra has talked about making interfaces that are first fun as a toy—enjoyable to use without any greater aim.

The 2D portion is a particle simulation that “feeds” the growing sphere made with Lottie. It’s inspired by the charging animation common in games before your character delivers a big blow. Every action needs a windup. A big action—in order to feel big—needs a big wind up.

This is the big moment—it has to feel gratifying. We again combine 2D and 3D elements. The sphere and checkmark pop in and a massive starburst fills the screen like an enemy hit in Hollow Knight.

Our digital products are trapped behind a hard pane of glass. We use the term “touch”, but we never really touch them. To truly Feel a digital experience and have an app reach through that glass, requires the Designer to employ many redundant techniques. Video games figured this out decades ago. What the screen takes away, you have to add back in: animation, sound, and haptics.