Why

2025-02-20

Yes, I should have written one of these at the start of the project. Sorry.

Well, here’s the Mr. Gist:

• We live in a near future (a near now) where everyone is on their phone “all the time”. We all talk about how we’re on the metro or the bus and it’s just infinite people looking at black rectangles. And that’s not really 100% true, but it’s true enough.
• What are they doing on there? Well, you can’t really tell, but you know that it’s stuff like what you do: reading the news, sending messages, scrolling through social media, playing games, watching videos, dating. And other things, but that’s a decent whack of it.
• And how much of that do we really enjoy or want to be doing? A little bit more unclear - sometimes it’s great, sometimes it can feel like we’re doing it significantly to escape from doing anything else. And sometimes it can feel like doing it is a job and a job that sucks. And sometimes the whole thing is catastrophically anxiety-inducing.
• And yet, cycling back, it’s very compelling. It’s easy to do, it’s kind of soothing in a ritualistic way, we know what to do, we don’t have to engage outwardly which is a scary thing to do, especially in public, but also all the time.
• So what if we had an application on our phone that allowed us to seem to be on our phone, to go through those reassuring motions, to know what to do, to appear 100% like a human on their phone, but without having to actually be on our phone an exposed to the direness of the news, the panic of dating, the shitpile of social media, the emptiness of online video, the timesuck of games? A kind of contentless experience. For the win!
• That’s the underlying speculative but also totally honest motivation behind this particular game. I’m making it because I think it’s legitimately something people might use and find helpful and because it is fundamentally funny that that is a possible design goal. To me it’s both a piece of comedy and a piece of truth and I can’t tell which is more important or if they’re even distinct. (And I like that.)

That’s the rationale behind the core version of the game where your objective is both to look like you’re on your phone (I mean, you are, but without content) and to just relax a bit and not have to engage with any of the real or virtual worlds.

Then springing out of the idea that it is soothing to do phone interactions disconnected from any actual purpose, I wanted to make a version of this that is a specific attempt to create a “zen meditation” version of “being on your phone”. In this scenario we’re largely just reskinning the existing game by adding soothing zen sound effects and texts that help you to meditate and breathe. The idea here being that:

• Traditional forms of meditation where you sit really still and don’t think of anything are really HARD
• Being on your phone and just doing pointless empty shit is really EASY, but often makes you feel kind of bad or at least just dead inside (I’m exaggerating? I’m projecting?)
• What if you could go through the calm, disconnected, atomic motions of phone use (swiping, tapping, typing) as a form of meditation - a bit like “walking meditation” where you take a very simple act (well also like “breathing”) and focus in on that as a way to calm your thoughts
• And there you go, we have this application that will do that for you, you’re welcome

Again I can’t totally tell where I am on the funny versus honest spectrum with this one. I haven’t built it as I write this so I’m less clear on how much it might work or not, but my instinct is that it could be cool.

–

In the Games as Research meeting today we talked about Per Liljenberg Halstrøm’s journal article Design as Value Celebration: Rethinking Design Argumentation. A big part of that is the idea that you can/should frame design by thinking in terms of the values involved, and specifically in terms of how you are “celebrating” or “praising” those values through the design/thing in question (you could also be “blaming”).

So how does that work here?

Well I’d say that this overall project is an attempt to praise/celebrate both the idea of calm and fitting in as reasonable and desirable goals, and to blame the way our phones (and technology and everything else) work to destroy those goals. In the form of an application that tries to support your value of feeling calm and strangely not captive to your phone/the internet by allowing you to use your phone on different (celebratory) terms.

I tried.