Journal

Starting point (2025-01-07)

Took some time to think about this by making notes in Things on my phone:

Points for duration
Popping bubbles as typing
Precision scrolling
Taps and double taps
Swiping left and right
Don’t fixate too much on it being realistic, just cycling through those ideas
Plus emotional instructions
Pauses/waits
Taps in other places on the screen
Game like interactions? Angry birds, fruit ninja, etc? Associated emotions or just random? > I think random right? What is the general affect of a phone user? Take notes. Occasional > smile but mostly dead looking or serious or furrowed?
Is there a game over?
Are there leaderboards?
Can you quit?
Keep it fucking simple?
Double tap bubble style
Some kind of minimalist abstract language of input

Made a p5 template project which is where we are now. I’ll start with that assumption and go from there.

Question: what to do about desktop? Have “it is as if you were on your computer” too which the same stuff but some different interactions? Yes makes sense. But separate projects I suppose. One after the other. Phone first because it’s funnier. Computer one is the opposite of Boss Mode which is fun.

Getting it together (2025-01-07)

While I have a couple of moments let me think some more about the interactions/structure here. I will do a few sketches tomorrow to figure out some of the shape as well.

Structure

Interactions

I probably need to sit with my phone for a bit to truly taxonomize this, and also observe other people, but as a starting point (which if we’re being honest is probably going to end up being good enough as phones aren’t that complex and I’m not really trying to precisely reproduce recognizable apps or anything)

Are those the main ones?

Sequencing

And then there’s the question of sequencing. I don’t like the idea of simulating a specific app experience, but I think it’s true that there are kind of higher level organizatinos that are worth preserving right? Like swipe down then double tap, swipe down then double tap (Instagram where you’re liking pictures), or swipe right, scroll down, swipe left, etc… (and note that these could potentially be paired with emotion/face notes… but it may be best not to… I can feel this very real tension around whether I’m implying a narrative/real use or not - note that this seems key to me and that as of right now my heart/mind lies with the idea of NOT trying to do any simulation)

What are some of the larger organizational units we might think about (more and more this is seeming like I need some sort of small field study - if only of myself - of using apps and seeing what the behaviour is over time?)

Who are you trying to fool?

In amongst all this, a key question: WHO is meant to be fooled? Not the player, they’re meant to look like they’re on their phone which means mostly just a cursory glance from someone on the metro. But COULD mean they’re at home or at a party looking busy which might get more scrutiny. But still, it’s not like you ever look at anyone and think you know what they’re doing? Maybe matching swipes. Or games.

This is where the sort of metanarrative of the game comes in I guess. Much as in the previous two… the idea that it’s a tool with a purpose. In this case my working theory (which I really like) is that it’s a tool both to look like you’re on your phone (and so a NORMAL PERSON) but also to NOT be on your phone and thus not subject to the abject terrors and punishments of social media and the news and so on… but then of course to ACTUALLY STILL BE ON YOUR PHONE in terms of shutting out the world, hunching, wasting time… but then maybe arguably to ACTUALLY BE MEDITATING??? Ha ha… haaaa? What if…

The game-iness

A part of all this is that we have a game layer. You score points for

And I suppose that’s all. And that’s plenty. Could be really juicy, could be restrained. Unclear for right now. Kind of funny the juicier it is, but the juicier it is the less I can buy into the meditation story… which I do actually quite enjoy?

Emotional guide; face notes

There’s the component of this that refers back to It is as if you were playing chess, which is guidance on how to compose yourself physically, and most obviously facially (though because I just wrote “physically” I’m realizing that postural changes work pretty well here too). I don’t think these need to be connected to the interactions - you can smirk, frown, raise an eyebrow, be dead-faced (the most common note, haha) to anything any content any interaction. But this is an important bit for the “urban camouflage” idea involved in this.

God, this is actually pretty good? I’m talking myself into this pretty hard right now. Ah, young love.

Early sketching (2025-01-08)

The resolution on this image sucks, but it’s still legible I think. Or not? Maybe click to view? Struggling with just how terrible it is…

Next step is some prototyping, indeed.

First prototype; Feedback; Suite talking; and beyond (2025-01-10)

Early days still but did produce a simple prototype of randomized circle-tapping yesterday (which would be the build associated with this journal’s commit). I was happier than expected with the visual presentation on my phone, though need to discourage/rule out landscape because it just doesn’t work and isn’t part of the way you generally think of/see people doing stuff on their phones. But yeah the opening salvo worked pretty well. The commit included a couple of things to think about:

(44c547a)

Feedback

That’s all mostly technical stuff but it’s true especially I need some kind of philosophical position especially on the feedback element (juice or not juice?). There clearly needs to be feedback but my inclination as of right now is to lean into the kind of “Zen” conceit involved here and to make the sounds simple chimes or other zenny sounds (gongs?). Some way of continuing the emotional tone of calm, sort of trying to catch onto the seeming calm of this kind of phone use, but making it actually calm, but making it still engaging? So prototyping some sound formats makes sense, starting with Zenning. The other more obvious would be like a “pop” and the satisfaction around that, but I think that may lead to a more brainless experience?

Some simple animation for the circles appearing and disappearing makes sense too - maybe a combo fade+size in, and then just a size-out? Will try something today as I want to prototype a bit.

Then there’s the expressions thing… how to communicate body posture, emotion, thoughts, faces. Where to put it. I can just copy the chess game but worth revisting. Spoke with Rilla this morning around using emoticons (as in ASCII emoji) as a way to suggest things, but I think I probably still prefer the austerity of texts for this element… there’s this balancing act/trick around trying to hit the engagement/dissociation/peace target. Which I like as a core challenge for this one actually. And for the whole potential suite.

Suite talking?

One of the things that has been rising in my mind through thinking about it, talkng to Femke (about matching apps), and talking to Csongor via the growing stuff repo, is this sense of a larger and more specialized suite of apps based on this core concept. It is as if you were on your phone is the generalized idea, but it’s clear that an interesting and worthwile thing to make would be replacement apps for all the classics (WhatsApp, Messages, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). Each one is a minimalist set of interactions that replicate what it looks like to be on those apps, but subtracts the content. And you could have all of them to create this phone environment that’s purely about the (soothing?) motions of social media etc., but is really about calm and inner peace because you get the advantages of the Wall of your phone (nobody should bother you, you’re entitled to this space) without the anxieties/pressures of the actual content.

Making this a much bigger project is pretty interesting. I think it still makes sense to start with the general case, though, and then perhaps to expand from there. Because I suspect the larger/broken down Suite would have to be a little more professional, maybe even on the App store instead of “just” a website. Though maybe the website works for sheer accessibility as the browser really isn’t bad in terms of the screen real estate available and you could make a little fake home screen and so on for it.

Anyway, I think this is the right starting approach for right now.

And beyond

Rilla asked the question “when are you going to make It is as if you were being a person?” and that’s genuinely pretty inspiring. I can imagine an album or a podcast (which? podcast is funnier) which has tracks/episodes that are literally vocal instructions for “how to be” in a specific context. Could consult with Jorge and Jadé about language, pacing, etc. Maybe make background music in the PO or something fun, and just put them out there. Like 20 minute tracks (akin to meditations) where you don’t have to deal with the pressure of figuring out how to be normal/unobtrusive.

Plays into neurodiversity stuff in pretty obvious ways, but I also think it can play strangely into entry points to meditation, freedom from ourselves. Could also imagine a novel where all these things exist, but let’s not go there please. PLEASE.

So that’s something else to consider building up some experitise and scripts for, but it’s a totally separate project, but might be fun to think about an episode/track for A MAZE. A general purpose track would be really funny too. Just “around the house” would be funny. There’s a sort of bizarre “life coaching” angle in it too. It’s definitely funny.

To p5 or not to p5? Thumb radius? The real thing? Zen? (2025-01-13)

To p5 or not to p5?

The most boring thing first. In running tests it seems like at least in the ways I’ve been able to investigate, p5 is giving me a pretty massive lag on touch events, enough that it feels bad. I can’t seem to find a way to make this not happen - mostly it seems like any touch fires two events, and the second one is actually the one that takes effect and is delayed enough that it feels laggy. It would be great if I could figure this out as I’m pretty comfortable in p5, but if I can’t?

I played around a teeny bit with PixiJS to write this little thing

// Create our application instance
(async () => {
    const app = new PIXI.Application();
    await app.init({
        width: window.innerWidth,
        height: window.innerHeight,
        backgroundColor: 0x2c3e50,
        antialias: true
    })
    document.body.appendChild(app.canvas);

   const gr  = new PIXI.Graphics()
    .circle(200, 200, 30)
    .fill(0xffffff)
    .on("pointerdown", (event) => {
        app.stage.removeChild(gr);
    });

    gr.eventMode = "static";
    
    app.stage.addChild(gr)
   
})();

I ran this in their sandbox and learned a few basic Pixi things to get a circle you can tap and it goes away. It goes away instantly. However, it’s also true that I can get “instant” performance in p5 so long as there’s no conditional checking if the circle is clicked… which obviously I need, but… why the fuck would a very minimal if-statement cause a substantial delay in processing exactly?

Well okay while I was writing that and becoming so incredulous that this kind of problem could conceivably exist I dug further into the double-event problem and wrote code to ignore the “mousedown” event that’s triggered (LATE) on a touch, listening only to the “touchstart”. That turns out to work it seems - I get a responsive feel for the taps (though I need to test directly on my phone).

So for now I suppose I won’t abandon p5 just to keep prototyping in a world that I know, but there are probably a bunch of other questions that are going to arrive around potential physics and feel that I dunno if I can solve. Swipes are a huge one (though I can use the swiping library I think to address some of this stuff? Hammer was it? Something else? Swipe.js?). Still really unclear on how to handle specifically the “swipe right” kind of feeling most of all in terms of symbols… could I have literally an arrow that says… swipe right? swipe left? scroll down? scroll up? stop? etc… more directed, less zen? Maybe that’s the thing that gets me to a less zen place which I think might have been a distraction? (Though I quite like the zen version of this? As opposed to the “fitting in as a human” version… hmm it’s still unclear…)

Maybe you could even incorporate the instruction iself into the text about what you do with your face? “Swipe right and wince”?

Thumb radius?

Exciting I know but as I was interacting with the early prototype on the metro I found that the circles were spawning too high sometimes for me to reach them with solo thumb, which I think it’s a pretty default design issue that you are not supposed to have in all these apps? So I should probably think about a spawn zone that’s lowed down to deal with that so that this thing can be successfully one handed.

And thinking of that made me think of

The real thing?

What if I approve the design of this game in terms of “secretly” switching between modes which reflect the interaction patterns of different apps, e.g. a TikTok mode, a YouTube mode, an Instagram mode, a Messages mode, a reading the news/website mode? That would help sustain more “sensible” patterns. I wouldn’t even need to tell the user this is happening up top, and it would then feed more or less directly into work on the App Suite version of this project, for which this thing is in some ways a prototype/general case?

That would allow me to tackle the whole thing mode by mode rather than as a whole mega thing.

So that’s the next kind of plan; break it into modes, have the modes switch at random points of time, but don’t tell the user so they don’t need to worry as much about being “in character” for the mode. This is sort of the “least stressful” version?

Zen?

I need to think more about the Zen thing. Versus “just” the social camouflage thing.

Swipe prototyping; visual prototyping; the main thing (2025-01-16)

Swipe prototyping

I did get a basic swiping thing going with a visual indicator today. Just a little pip that runs along inside a bar based on swipe velocity. It’s not much, but it’s felt helpful to have something a bit more clearly responsive and it felt like it got a bit at the question of what kind of visual representation to have… which in turn led to doing some visual prototyping because I’m still not really sold on the approach…

Visual prototyping

Visual designs for swiping in the game

Visual designs for typing in the game

Visual designs for scrolling in the game

The main thing

In putting together the above visual prototypes (which I did not labour over, but which were helpful as a way to break free from the code) I kept running up against the classic stupid question: what is this thing about. As with any portion of the project, it’s really hard to make serious decisions about anything without having the underlying principles in place.

There are a few competing ideas going on here, not all necessarily on the same axes…

I’ve thought about the Social Camouflage thing as primary - helping people fit in while avoiding social media exhaustion- What about passive experiences of a cellphone? When people are watching YouTube, they’re just watching YouTube; do we have a “Watch this rectangle” activity? I mean, that’s very funny, but goes against the idea you can “lose” I had earlier. Or does the timer not expire for watching the rectangle? Watch this progress bar, with no timer for losing.

In writing this out I think a more abstract understanding is better. So no need in this version to think hard about what the interaction sequences (and specific screen locations) are for, say, TikTok.

I’m concerned by the tension between relief/social camouflage and the gamified version where it seems like it would be very stressful. Why would you play this as a game specifically? There’s some way in which that ends up feeling too close to the real experience? Am I just concerned that without some gamified element people won’t see the point in interacting longer term? But if it’s an application, then it’s not really intended to be played in that way - it’s a tool not a game?

This is making me think we kill the game-y elements.

So we’d be landing on something like: