Skip to content
For existing friends, you might want to share deeper internet connection in the same way someone uses Close Friends in Instagram. For friends, the core differentiator is that you can have a broadcast mechanic tied to your existing use of the Internet in a way that group chats, etc. doesn’t offer you. For strangers: you can have meaningful encounters and even form new, casual relationships with people who share a lot of the same interests with you.
what if there’s some high-level collective goal that you can try to achieve every season?should you get closer to winning just from browinsg?should it be “game-able” or like should you be able to invest time into it to deliberately try to win? Yes but it should rely on doing so in a way where you are just browsing as normal more not any sort of busywork
what ephemeral encounters? how to build collective trust & presence? what intimate encounters are unlocked through repeated ephemreal enconters?ephemeral encounters: like passing over each other, crossing paths, observing the weather together, leaving something on a site that goes away?more intimate encounter: want to know the context of someone’s experience to know how they have come to their worldview (similar to the rabbitholing / geocaching thing) this is areal-time multiplayer emotes: ones that express somethingspinjumpwaveones that require another person to complete:high-five (hold out hand out-stretched when another player gets close with their cursor we have a high-five animationcircle spin (tiktok video where you hold hands with osmeone and swing them around in a circle)
entropy & decay ? how to accumulate in a place?real-time encounters are rare but can be very meaningful if the build-up is right and the environment facilitates something more meaningful than surfaceasync encounters are commonb ut need to be personal / special in some way to make them meaningful for you to see the personality on the other side or the scale of humanity.ex: Facebook and twitter dont really feel meaningful to encounter but someone’s guestbook is?img_0001 videos vs. scrolling tiktokplayhtml fridge vs. seeing the firehose?something about it being contextual and special matters more? firehose gets close to it though but you are detached from it i guess you have to be in it
message in a bottleYou find bottles as you browse — they spawn on "quiet" pages (deeper in link hierarchies, personal sites, niche corners — not google.com or gmail). The deeper you browse, the more you find.Open a bottle, read a short message from a stranger. Write one, cast it out — it washes up on a random page someone else visits.maybe after some frequency you can send directly to someone? ambient co-presence / cursorsBlurred warm dot wherever another extension user's cursor is on the same page. Dot sharpens as your cursors approach each other (full reveal at 50px). Completely non-interactive, impossible to be annoying.When someone leaves a page, their last 3 seconds of cursor movement lingers as a fading trail for 8 seconds — ghostly evidence that someone was just here.some sort of waiting room or interlude or liminal space in between navigations?Revived from "commute to websites" — not a waiting room (too much friction), but a brief whisper during page navigation: "someone you've crossed paths with 4 times this week was just here." Awareness baked into the act of clicking links.“Go live” concept for intentional sharingPeople can sit and watch others browse the webTheater-like experience with cursors visible to watchersRequires opt-in to set proper expectationsVisit Status as a Primitive The extension knows if you're a first-timer, a regular, or a frequent visitor. Expose this to website owners via playhtml so their sites can respond differently — welcome messages for newcomers, hidden rooms for regulars… how else could your experience of the site change?maybe this i sjust baked into data model but not an actual social featureOwner-Placed Easter Eggs (Phase 3)Website owners leave hidden messages/objects that only extension users can see? requires some playhtml code setup - maybe it can just be a web componentor maybe it happens via extensionb ut you have to put a setup in your website that validates your public key that u are the owner?Objects / Inventory System (Phase 3+)Baseline objects you pick up while browsing and can use in different places. Bottles are the first object type. Website owners could define custom drops. This is the "game layer" - not sure how to scale this / have people plug into thisopens up to more customized items & worlds, like absurd sponsored things like lockheed martin missiles to bomb other websites or crocsthink fortniteDepth constraint: the quieter the corner of the internet, the more you findDigital entropy: things fade, age, decay without human interventionTrust by design: nothing another user can do to harm you — the Runescape Wilderness lessonCare, returning, accumulation: every feature should enable one of these three
What is in the “frame” of the designed / laid out site, what is in another “layer” like something that slides out, another window, a modal, etc? how does someone understand where playhtml begins and where it ends?How to account for different spectrums of stateful vs. dynamicityfixed size (lamp) vs. dynamic (guestbook)how do you conceptualize space? in physical space, it’s clear what is here vs. there. in digital space, things can be shared or forked or replicated. how is the mental model intuitive and consistent for what is a shared space and what becomes a different shared space?think about video games and that consistency.ex: moving from one domain to another feels like a different space, you might be able to “take” an element from one website and move it to another and it would make sense, but if one person took an element from the website from the same website it would be weird if you didnt see themephemeral social intetractions vs. meaningful ones?ephemeral encounters: like passing over each other, crossing paths, observing the weather together, leaving something on a site that goes away?more intimate encounter: want to know the context of someone’s experience to know how they have come to their worldview (similar to the rabbitholing / geocaching thing) this is a
Interaction Design
Fundamentally, we care about fostering . This does not mean that you enforce everything to be “nice” but things should generally trend towards helping people depend on each other and make real connection with each other.
A lot of this is about cultivating trust across strangers and figuring out how to grow natural gradients of intimacy to grow closer to some people.
Here’s a good set of principles for building increased social relationships in a game from
Proximity: Put players in serendipitous situations where they regularly encounter other players. Allow them to recognize one another across multiple play sessions.
Similarity: Create shared identities, values, contexts, and goals that ease alignment and connection.
Reciprocity: Enable exchanges (not necessarily material) that are bi-directional with benefits to both parties. With repetition, this builds relationships.
Disclosure: Further grow trust in the relationship through disclosing vulnerability, testing boundaries, etc.
“should only invite intimacy rather than force it”
Audience-wise, this game should have value for playing both with existing friends and with strangers.
What is the objective of the game?
CORE DESIGNS TO EXPLORE
POTENTIAL SOCIAL FEATURES
we were online is designed such that most of the textured, personal, and expressive social features should come from the community via custom playhtml integrations / build-outs (like the Wikipedia-specific link patina and following people down rabbit holes). But we should have some baseline social features that work across all websites. These should be minimal and simple enough that they work on every website but
flexible enough to allow for interesting emergent behavior.
Design Principles Across All Features:
Communal interaction designs are at the heart of what playhtml enables and requires in order to reach broad culture.
some fundamental questions
SOCIAL INTERACTIONS
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ··· in the right corner or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.