Sculpting Attention
Finitude, idiosyncrasy and personality
I just got back from 2 weeks in the US and Canada, the bulk of the trip was spent on the inaugural Subconscious team on-site and then I spent a few days climbing with my friend Zaymon.
After touching grass for a while, stepping back into the digital world seems overwhelming by comparison. Every website or app I open immediately starts blasting a stream of novelty into my eyeballs, sucking me into the global hivemind. We are all “together” online but we are rarely connected in the fully present sense we are accustomed to IRL. To be clear, digital experiences can facilitate deep connection1 but the design of most of our digital environment drives us towards a fractured, atomised and passive mode of engagement.
Infinite lists, grids, canvases - whatever UI abstraction - the temptation in the digital realm is always to make things simultaneously infinite and personalised. This is obviously one of the strengths of software in the first place, we have access to a practically infinite amount of information and can wield it for great benefit2. But something also happens to us when we use these interfaces: it all begins to feel the same.
Over time, I’ve found myself dedicating more and more brain power to filtering signal from noise. Instead of spending time considering or immersed in a given media artefact3 I am instead holding everything at a distance. Everywhere I turn, I must defend myself from potential mind-viruses, psy-ops and plain old garbage. The infinite variety of the universe is crammed into the same scroll, categorise, search, filter, sort cycles. When I shift into this non-committal “browsing” headspace I notice two qualities:
The marginal effort (cost) of finding and “consuming” more content drops to zero
The felt “value” of the content itself also drops to zero
In contrast, consider airplane movies. Any movie you watch on a flight gets at least a +2 buff to the review score4. No option paralysis, no checking IMDB scores. My attention is laser focused, there’s no point checking my phone, and it is this quality of attention that makes all the difference.
The way you wield your attention over time, the patterns and cycles, determine your baseline experience of reality. Our experience is made up of our sensory focus combined with our physical and psychological environment. The way we structure our attention is shaped by the media we interact with. Each medium, digital or otherwise, brings different attentional dynamics with it. Somehow, browsing physical game boxes in isolation vs. browsing Steam leaves me feeling like Bubsy 3D might be better than Starfield.
Context matters (a lot) and the tools and platforms that we use to consume our delicious content make it feel like generic nutrient slurry. There is equal, but near-zero, respect for each individual creator and creation. Posts, products and people are all encoded as disposable UI controls, dismissed with the flick of a greasy fingertip.
As these digital distribution formats mature, media has changed. Profitable creation synonymous with minimum time-to-market with the majority of work put into the outermost layer. We just need to get someone to engage. Creators across all platforms5 are stuck in a game designed to exploit them, trying to endlessly make number go up, farming gold for the parent company that controls the distribution network. We’re too zoomed in to remember what it means to engage with media in a human way.
I struggle with this too, which is why I am writing about it. Sometimes I catch myself doing “market research” browsing similar games to WizardChess and ruminating. Do we have enough wishlists? Enough reviews? Should I be posting about the game more? (yes, but anyway). I look at our metrics and I see inadequacy, yet every metric we have is an order of magnitude larger than our past projects and we’re still in Early Access.
On Steam, for many people, our game just wouldn’t jump out of the lineup. But, if I hand someone a controller, almost everyone says “Hey, this is really good! You made this!?” Does this mean we have an unoptimized marketing funnel and a steep onboarding experience? Sure, probably, but I’d argue we all have an attention calibration problem. Depending on your perspective, every game is “just another game” or, it’s “a whole thing that someone made”.
WizardChess can’t retain its creative identity and be the most eye catching game on Steam. In almost every aspect of the design it’s a game that rewards your focus and determination, so why try and paint the exterior to make it seem otherwise? Just to shout louder than everyone else?
The way in which we experience endless entertainment options leads to a desensitisation to each individual work. Projects that took years of labour from teams of people are collapsed down to a thumbnail + title combo. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but in my opinion you should pair a picture with a matching frame.
Finite options and idiosyncratic presentation create experiences with personality. As a game designer I see my craft as designing rituals for how we engage with agency. Certain sequences of actions, with specific details, in a specific order conjure an emotional landscape for a player.
I practice this constantly in my own life. Should I write on my phone, on my iPad, my laptop? With music? In the dark? With coffee? After exercising? Rather than deciding on a specific configuration, these are all modes I have access to that can shape my attention and change the nature of my experience. I aspire to design the game loops of my life to facilitate mental and physical states as I deem appropriate6. I see each moment as an opportunity to experiment with experience, trialling new ingredients, techniques and flavours for my “experience menu”.
Currently, I find myself chewing on a few questions:
How can we build tools that preserve or amplify the personality of media?
How can content feel significant in the era of infinite distraction?
How can we connect emotionally with one another using technology?
In answering, I keep coming back to Booster Packs7. It’s just fun to open a Booster Pack of trading cards. The feel of the wrapping, the order of the cards, the mixture of known8 and unknown. Even though I know there are thousands of copies of my cards out there, these ones are mine. Conversely, it’s numbing to be fed an infinite scrolling list of cards picked '“just for you”. There’s no ceremony, no significance to any of it.
So, I think the first step is to push back against drowning users in excessive choice. Software applications should shape the user’s intention to aid them in their goals, not simply to maximise engagement9.
I want to design end-to-end technological experiences that synergise with your life, your goals and your priorities10. I want to build whole worlds to explore, not just “products”:
Immersive games that respect your time and agency as a player
User interfaces that guide you through natural rhythms of thought
Tools to enhance your creativity and self-expression
I want to design curated set(s) of building blocks that you can use to determine your own digital environment. I want people to connect with one another over those building blocks, sharing strategies and discoveries, forming communities.
Rather than idly surfing the web, perhaps we can dive into it together.
Until next time,
✌️ Ben
Stuff I’ve Been Thinking About
🗺️ Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
🧮 Infinite Counting: The Absurdity of the Digital
👁️ Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
☸️ Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order
😴 The Supreme State of Unconsciousness
e.g. a Minecraft server with a few good friends
This just in: computers are useful
A fancy way of saying “TikTok”
this means the D&D movie was probably closer to a 7/10, but man did it feel like a 9/10
Spotify, Steam, TikTok, YouTube etc.
I’m not weird, you’re weird
I don’t know what that says about me
Count & rarity mostly known, actual cards unknown
Ideally, these would be aligned, but that is hard to imagine in the media distribution space