As this year draws to a close, I find myself at a moment of synthesis. I released WizardChess 1.0 after 5 years of development, we wound down Subconscious and founded Common Tools. I made more art than ever. Overall, my life looks very different to a few years ago. What little degree of certainty I ever had about "what I'm doing" had faded into the background. I find myself using an intuition-first approach to my work with no formal separation between art, design and engineering... finally, back to just making stuff with computers.
I'm tired of analytical frames that promise certainty and absolutes. I'm tired of concrete goals and stories about what's "virtuous." I find myself still asking the same open-ended question I have been for decades:
What the hell is creativity?
More specifically, how can we use creativity to develop our humanity?
I’ve been using the computer to help me think since I was 8 years old and somehow, despite the decaying state of the internet, it feels like we’re still scratching the surface of Human-Computer Interaction as a field.
Shifting Perspective
I'm endlessly determined to find a framing around videogames that does justice to how important they feel to me. Games are often dismissed as "a waste of time" or "pure entertainment" but I disagree. To me, they are portals to ritualistic focus. Games act as digital shamanic tools that point us to different pockets of our consciousness. Game designers manipulate agency itself as their canvas, leading you down the paths less trodden1.
A given game offers us an alternate physics of agency. By playing, we are shifting the dynamics of our perception. Through experiencing multiple games2 and seeing how other people interpret the same game, differently, that we start to glimpse "dragonfly thinking" - thinking from multiple angles simultaneously to consider the hyperobject at the intersection.
Beyond "Entertainment"
The magic of a game isn't in the mechanics or aesthetics alone, but in how they encode algorithms of thought and experiential patterns. Think about any skill you've mastered: cooking, drawing, driving, teaching, coding. Each represents not just a set of actions, but a particular way of seeing and being in the world. Our total individual perspective is the superposition of all these roles we can play. Games offer us the opportunity to explore and expand this repertoire, systematically.
Exploring a new perspective isn't about replacement or optimization - it's about translation and expansion. When we encounter a new way of seeing, we have to actively translate it into our existing mental models to comprehend it. Any gaps in this translation are where the real learning happens, highlighting areas where our current understanding needs to grow3.
Of course, this power can be wielded for different ends. The same mechanisms that Blizzard and Valve use to hook children on not-quite-legally-gambling loops could, in theory, be used to develop deeper metacognitive abilities and improve people’s lives4. The key difference lies in how we wield them – experimentally, mindfully, with awareness of their incentives and dynamics.
Composing in Metacognitive Space
Software offers a unique set of qualities for the metacognitive. It allows us to encode rigid, conceptual definitions while simultaneously letting us manipulate and iterate on those very definitions. It's both an information system and a meta-information system5, where we can evolve and compare implemented ontologies side by side, offloading the cognitive burden of logic to the CPU. I'm increasingly convinced that we should shift from seeing computers as "tools for thought" to "tools for metacognition" - not just systems for thinking, but systems for studying and augmenting the dynamics of thought.
There's no shortcut or 10-step-process for this. Someone has to do the synthesis. Everything we experience is made of thought and perception, to study it means paying attention6. It is only by drawing from lived experience that we can effectively evoke specific cognitive and emotional states. Take me there, don't tell me about it. To me, human-centric design means crafting systems and environments that naturally elicit particular ways of being. Think of stepping into a Cathedral, or an office, a bar or a gym. Crossing the threshold primes you for what follows.
Insight isn't just about finding the right articulation for the right person at the right moment (though, that can work). Instead, insight can be reliably induced through skilful traversal of metacognitive space - orchestrating the juxtapositions, transitions, and sequences of perspectives over time to reveal a higher-dimensional understanding7. Like a painter or a composer, we can design experiences that gradually expand the someone’s cognitive repertoire, playing with tension throughout, but leaving them to draw their own conclusions.
Design for Consciousness
To design this way requires intimate knowledge of your own consciousness, but also of a diverse array of perspective to contrast against. I love to hear anecdotes that challenge my existing framing. It’s exciting to me when someone can invalidate my mental model, it means I could stand to learn something!
Imagine if we had access to a growing repository of ways other people think about their lives? What if we could explore, adjust and author those ways of thinking ourselves, as matter of discussion? What if we could create mental spaces that act as mirrors, reflecting and refracting our one another's thought patterns in ways that lead to new insights? Well, we already did this once, it’s called literature. Why don’t we have the same for information systems and interaction design? Why can’t we compute with perspective?
I'm leaning into this approach to design. Rather than starting with frameworks or mechanics, it means beginning with the cognitive states and perspectives we want to access, then working backwards to create spaces that naturally evoke them and provide dynamics that expand our thinking. Our role as designers isn't to prescribe experiences, but to create environments where particular kinds of experiences become possible, comfortable, or even inevitable.
So, no year-end lists or concrete goals. Let’s hope for a year of new ideas, new creative tools, new adventures and, hopefully, new ways of thinking.
See you in the next one,
✌️ Ben
Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About
Or, the path more commonly trodden… into a virtual casino
Not just “you’re a guy with a sword”, see Baba Is You or Caves of Qud
I suspect this is at the root of my issue with "the metaverse", a web of interconnected, user-generated spaces isn't the point - the real benefit is collision and sharing of perspectives... which is what the Internet should be in the first place.
Imagine that!
and as meta-meta-information system, but that's usually self-describing
and paying attention to attention
an example: 6 Faces of Globalization