Feedback Request
I’d love feedback around 1) any ideas around questions in the document, 2) what resonates about certain framings, features, or hypotheses, and 3) anything important missing from my priorities or questions.
Please feel free comment liberally throughout the document. At the end, you’ll find a table where you can submit high-level feedback.
Context
is an for designing communal internet experiences by enhancing web elements with real-time, collaborative interactivity. playhtml aims to provide the infrastructure for making new diverse and open forms of "social media" that make the web feel alive. By providing the means to shape the way we interact with each other on the web, it invites people to imagine what websites can become and who we can become when we inhabit them. How can playhtml help us move towards a pluriversal internet with diverse and rich ways of making, expressing ourselves, and relating to each other in digital spaces?
FAQ
How does playhtml compare with decentralized social media like Mastodon / Bluesky? playhtml is aligned with decentralized social media efforts such as the Fediverse and AT Protocol / Bluesky. However, while they establish the baseline networking infrastructure and recreate popular established formats (microblogging), playhtml is interested in new kinds of interactive and tangible social experiences on the web. These decentralized identities and data storage can be easily integrated into playhtml in the future.
How does playhtml compare with traditional social media platforms like Instagram / Twitter / Tiktok? Goals
Establish playhtml as the easiest infrastructure for designing communal experiences Create a sustainable container for holding this work Evangelize creating websites that design for shared experiences to challenge the default way we view websites Design a diverse set of communal interactions that digital spaces can adopt and explore new pop-up formats for sharing them with the community Explore a new medium of game-making that unfolds across different existing websites on the internet. what does an internet-native game look like? Sustainability and Marketing
a strategy for sustainability and for marketing this work as something that is quite different from the status quo of internet interactions.
Sustainability
We should have a built-in incentive for creative studios to create public goods to make using the Internet easier, healthier, and more empowering. In the same way that we fund the development of our cities in exchange for civil guarantees, can we fund the Internet to make it a safe, fun, beautiful place for all of us?
What does the ideal sustainability strategy for this kind of work look like, and in lieu of that, what is the most practical container for it to exist in?
playhtml is building both an open protocol and also a product. Ideally, playhtml is a public good for the internet and gets funding from institutions that support work to imagine how the internet can be more human-centered. There is some funding available (mostly from the European Union, e.g. ), but it is scarce and unreliable. AT Protocol has the closest model, where they are simultaneously building a protocol and a product that uses the protocol. But what are alternative methods of sustaining this? Does a small business approach work, and if so, how would playhtml make money? What about a community-funded “internet tools” studio (ala indie game studio)? What’s the best way to validate approaches? Can a project that relies on grant funding ever feel safe to be sustainable?
Marketing
playhtml’s current community straddles those who care about a more human-focused internet (mostly hobbyists and website enthusiasts) and those who keep up with the latest developer tools. playhtml has received really positive and emotional reception from sharing it online and everyone I’ve showed it to. Comments include feelings around breaking their mind about what you can do on the internet and how it feels like pure magic. However, only a few people that I know of have created sites using playhtml, even as I’ve been doing more to promote and encourage this.
My hypothesis is that the disconnect between what kinds of experiences playhtml enables and what kinds of experiences we’re used to on the internet proves to be too big of a hurdle for people getting started. When they see what you can do with it, they are very excited about the possibilities, but I don’t think they know exactly what to use it for, given how different it is from what we normally experience. The end effect of integrating playhtml is also often unclear in the simplest cases because you don’t see what other people see on their computer when they visit your website. So making something communal (like a button on your website) will not be immediately apparent how it changes the experience (which is something that is incredibly prized in the development of websites).
playhtml is only successful if it reaches a broader community and influences our culture for using the internet. The rise in popularity of multiplayer video games and collaborative creative tools like Figma provides a suitable foundation to reach people who are questioning how the internet might look different if it were more multiplayer and shared by default. The collective yearning for more third spaces in physical communities and a general dismay in how our devices affect us also inform a base need that playhtml can speak to.
What are promising ways to promote building on top of playhtml? one friend suggested a hackathon the playhtml store (shown below) a library of communal interactions you can reference and take inspiration from (this is what i’ve been trying with my list of ) Who are important communities to reach? internet enthusiasts who don’t identify as developers (”html energy,” no frameworks, programming as a way to express themselves) hobbyist developers building small tools (programmer by trade, uses React or another modern javascript framework) creative agencies who are contracted to build company and professional sites (sanctuary.computer) new media art folks who want to make interesting art experiences (NEW INC) programming and design students (what would a syllabus around communal web experiences look like?) video game designers and enthusiasts (the ) strong-knit communities who have a desire for small gathering spaces for their own use (DIY nextdoor) What are good institutions to partner with to spread reach? Interaction Design
Communal interaction designs are at the heart of what playhtml enables and requires in order to reach broad culture.
some fundamental questions
what are promising avenues of explorations? use case based? 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 to account for different spectrums of stateful vs. dynamicity fixed size (lamp) vs. dynamic (guestbook) what are more imaginative ways of showing current presence (like beyond cursors)? color traces (ala kinopio) an aura or gradient (incorporated into background of site) an ephemeral image of the other person fades in and out as you get close to them (ala Sky or other video games with this) what are more imaginative ways of showing past presence? wear and tear (how do you show this?) interactions that enable visitors to leave something that fades away over time “X days since site has been opened / closed / touched / maintained” “This site has consumed 523 minutes of attention” cursor distance traveled, scroll distance traveled An ecosystem and library of communal interactions
What if we created a “gallery” for exploring these and a “store” for using these that can reward interaction designers?
PLAY(html) store: a store for Internet Interactions
This ecosystem could feature both:
a gallery / library for showcasing different communal interactions with live examples. a store for buying (pay what you will) complex experiences for your own site and 3rd party submission support that would consist of
mini-games (, , , puzzle, ) common components (live visitor count, a chat room, one-pixel-per-person canvas, guestbook) how can we help templatize the web? can pulling these functions in be as easy as pulling in a font from google fonts? and allow for experiences like
branded collaborations for a new kind of interactive marketing experience (Gentle Monster glasses for your cursor, IKEA web furniture that is collaboratively assembled, these can be used as actual activations on partner websites or shopping experiences Infrastructure
The core infrastructure is in place for designing and creating communal experiences on the web. There is support for both HTML with no javascript and modern javascript frameworks like React and Next, the simplest interactions are available from a single data attribute on elements (e.g. collaboratively movable elements with can-move ), and there is full expressibility to program a custom interaction with a developer experience that just feels like working with any other local state.
The next set of explorations for the infrastructure are more speculative and exciting. For each of these, what would you imagine the feature enabling?
shared/embeddable elements: functionality for sharing elements (or simply data) across websites. This would enable creating components on the web that live across multiple websites and can be changed from any of the locations. Similar to how an iframe allows a site to embed another site, this feature would enable fine-grained control over which piece of a website you want to embed from another enables... website friendship lamps, interactive web rings, cross-domain social media authentication: enabling authenticating who the current user is and authorizing what actions they are allowed to take from a custom set of possible permissions. This should work with or without the aid of a browser extension and should be possible and safe without requiring people to host their own servers, close-source their code, or manage a third-party account (this is required for the browser extension game). enables... editing your website using playhtml, customizing actions for a group of friends, lightweight owner moderation start to build up interpersonal networks across any page. what happens with these shared networks? local vs multiplayer behavior: currently, playhtml’s data is either stored (both locally and on a cloud server) or not saved and only transmitted live (e.g. live cursors). This would provide functionality to have more fine-grained controls over how the data should be stored (transmitted live only, local-only, or globally). Having an API around this can make it easier for people to logic about how communal web experiences should play out. scheduling support: functionality to enable “cron-like” capabilities that happen on some specified interval. For example, I could specify that the lamp on my website should turn off at 8pm every night. custom persistence: functionality to bring your own database that supports a wide range of options across developer-familiarity levels, from an S3 bucket to a google drive file to a coda table or airtable base. (in the future) bring your own data: integrating with open data standards like AT Protocol and Activity Pub → can you sync your data to your Bluesky PDS? enables... ownership of data and privacy, exporting playhtml data to other services web components: support web components for common components, see PLAY(html) store. enables... an ecosystem of components designed around communal web experiences Speculative API explorations : an attribute that automatically syncs attributes of an element across all clients. This could make it easy to program your own communal experience without worrying about managing the communal state, as you can simply write it as if you were changing it normally. this requires some safeguards like allow-listing which attributes should sync because it’s vulnerable to any changes from the browser dev tools, too. eventing / wish-like API: automatically expose all DOM events so that from anywhere, you can write code to react to playhtml events. Internet Game
an internet-wide game that unfolds across the ever-growing universe of websites participating
The initial inspiration from this idea was how to create an internet environment that has all the emergent properties of city living ecosystems, where phenomena like , , and can sprout and flourish. This exploration will build off of my prior work, called tiny internets, in 2022. is a browser extension that allowed you to hide messages after someone had visited a set of websites (like a digital geocache). There have been several attempts in the past (and several current attempts all in the web3 space) to create a MMORPG-like game that takes place on the internet via browser extension. Many of the previous ones gained lots of popularity but then failed due to high costs and niche interests. The current ones still seem very niche by focusing on specific market entries like streamers or promoting a high-level global narrative or world. They also face adoption barriers because of their dependence on installing a browser extension.
It's interesting to see how stumbleupon was acquired for $75 million and pmog was dead. they had similar theories about the internet (making the internet fun), but went about it in very different ways. pmog is more experimental and weird, definitely not for everyone, while stumbleupon is more neutral, platform-like, and meant to be invisible. so then its like what do i want playhtml to be? something in between I suppose -- invisible in the sense that it is an interface and empowers people to fill it with _their_ content and creations, but also weird and textured in that it challenges people to use the internet in a different way.
stumbleupon's draw was curation of the internet—this is now fulfilled by social media and pmogs draw was im not really sure lol it seems super niche but also something that people fell in love with? i guess its the draw of an indie game and having its own story? im not sure actually how many people were drawn to what it was
Possible interactions
stooping things from people’s websites and placing them on other people’s websites an inventory that you can carry around leaving interactive gifts for people on their website for the owner of the website: e.g. a letter that opens up or a flower that blooms. for visitors to the website: thank you letters turning existing elemnets on websites into interactive playhtml elements maybe AI can suggest which things would be good (generally images.. or others that feel like distinct “objects”: buttons, ...) to make a game, you must have a website probably does need to have some easier way to make, subdomains from playhtml or something or piggyback on things like glitch, neocoties, etc. im not in the business of hosting websites
core questions
what difference in what you can do on extension vs website core feeling that people should get “wow!” joyful surprise in discovering the game for the first time “wow!” - theres so much life in this to uncover “damn” - there’s so much humanity and stories to learn about here game mechanics / audience
mostly cozy and farming-core create your own item types? connect to your data / feed off your posts? respawn rate or single item, people can define drops on their websites moments of vulnerability and emotion that come from that when your hands touch on a webpage interactions derived from different state dynamic state: number of times watered plant static state: number of times word rain is on page things that website owners can program / game nouns events like weather that are user created, programmable probabilities, are imperative and happen in response to a user action, or happen in response to a certain world state objects: discrete interact-able things where their interactions affect the game, can be retrievable (items) actions: the set of actions that a player can take with any number of objects, mapped to how they undertake the action. player: a user participating in the game (visiting a website integrated or has the extension installed ) cursor: player’s avatar? main form of interaction. can be customized get big names to integrate on their site matt webb, nolen and cursor umbrella, neal PRICING
similar gather mechanic but maybe monthly sliding scale? bc of ongoing costs maybe pay for extra features, cosmetic, lead ppl into your home, etc. take inspiration from the geocaching app website environment design interior design but for websites “change our furniture” make them magical etc. create live demonstrations of the service and also allow visitors to show their presence
playhtml March 2024 for IDEO
