Remember when social media was fun? – Organisations, commercial platforms, and people-sized communication in a late-capitalist hellscape

Disclaimer: this blogpost is based on my personal experiences working in various communication roles in Finnish cultural and governmental organisations (museums and bureaus) from the mid-00s. The story, and my conclusions, would be very different for corporate comms, advertisement, etc.

TABLE 1. Extremely scientific taxonomy of the stages of commercial social media use in organisations.

Year	Era	Major platform shifts	Hallmarks of use in orgs
2006–2010	Fun times	Formation of early Facebook & Twitter	Exploration, experimentation, personal voice
2010–2014	From posts to content	Instagram joins Facebook and Twitter as “the big ones”	Personal voice and exploration gives way to professionalism, brand control, social media teams, and content guidelines
2014–2021	Capricious algorithms	Snapchat breaks through, enter TikTok, WhatsApp is kinda sorta a social media now.	Managing socials becomes just another chore. Rise of trolls, bots, and bad-faith influencing. Algorithmic facilitation of experience becomes the default. “Pivot to video” in media, jfc.
2021–	Hellscape	Facebook becomes Meta, Twitter becomes X	Whatever this crap we have now is.

My day job is in communications, or comms in short: in the trade of designing and supporting everyday information flows and human connections within an organisation and between it and its audiences.

For 20 years, a big part of that job has been managing social media accounts. It was fun, at first. Then it was kind of routine. For at least 5 years now, it’s been pretty miserable.

What we call “social media” has gone through paradigmatic shifts that many organisations still haven’t really reacted to. Which is fine! Big ships turn slow.

But recently, I’ve started to wonder if perhaps some of that slowness to react is because we – the we in this post being us comms professionals – have evolved and grown up with these platforms, and in so doing we’ve forgotten why we chose social media as an official organisational communication channel to begin with.

Well.

Social media used to be cool.

This is a radical thing to say in 2026. But trust me! It really was.

Fun times (2006–2010)

Back in the 00s when we were transitioning from digital ecosystems centered on websites and blogs to these new and exciting social media platforms, places like Twitter and Facebook were something novel. Like side alleys or small cafés.

You would have your org's website as the main driver of digital communication. Maybe a blog on it, too. And a newsletter or a mailing list. Perhaps you even had a list of PR people you regularly exchanged emails with. That covered all your digital bases. Social media was something extra. A bit of experimentation.

Places like Twitter and Facebook didn't have all that many professional users or big brands, so there really weren't any norms to settle into. It was very common to have someone from the comms team – or any employee, really – to run your accounts with whatever tone and topics they deemed useful or interesting.

You'd have huge organisations speaking in the voice of a summer intern. You'd have an entire museum's social media presence built around dad jokes.

Of course there was information too. Real, boring, everyday comms about opening hours and such. But even that was presented in an easy, personal voice that was looking for connections. It was a conversation that contained both the personal voice of whoever ran the account as well as the more formal side of sharing info about the oganisation to which the account belonged to.

Was it sensible or particularly effective? Not really, no. But it was fun. It was digital communication divided into a front-facing official side on websites and a sort of chatty backstage on social media.

Though no one thinks of it this way any more, this was the secret juice digital evangelists, enthusiasts, technocrats, and aspiring comms specialists saw as genuinely novel: the freedom of being relaxed and open in these participatory social commons. Social media existed in corporate-owned walled gardens, sure, but the conversations they enabled felt aligned with the idea of the open web.

Suddenly, people had a direct line to organisations and public figures. Institutions that usually took part in discourse only via one-way means such as press releases or statements to press were suddenly… just there. Your city’s waste disposal service was cheerfully chatting about TV drama. The president liked a tweet. And you could talk to either of them. Not that they usually answered, but the possibility was thrilling nonetheless.

There was a sense of unprecedented mobility in the social sphere.

It was a trap, of course, but before things turned sour, the ease of use, committed audience, and light chatter from one early-adopting online dork to another created the high we're still chasing, even as subsequent stages of enshittification have taken us further from it.

From posts to content (2010–2014)

Then the whole thing became popular. We got the Eternal September of social media. A lot more people. A lot more brands, organisations, groups, and corporations.

Running an org's social media account was no longer a quirky sideshow. You had content strategies. Publishing schedules. Teams of experts. We were still chasing the person-to-person honesty and openness that had existed just a while ago, but for every interesting post there was a post with something like "leave a like if you LOVE our brand". We were starting to lose the lightning in the bottle.

Comms people started talking about "tone of voice".

Rather than something that naturally happened – and was then celebrated and aspired towards – the personal tone of an organisation's post was a liability. The most unique voices were, after all, impossible to replicate by the teams that were now running the accounts.

Since this was social media, and everyone was still chasing the initial high of the early days, It was still important to maintain the illusion of a real, living – maybe even interesting – person running the account, so we saw the introduction of a sort of standardized milquetoast language that sanded off the idiosyncrasies of individual team members while still also attempting to sound genuine.*

This meant endless workshops, planning documents, and serious meetings about how to present the organisation on social media. It was, essentially, an attempt to simultaneously fabricate and perform authenticity. Sort of like coming up with a fictional character any comms team member could play.

If the org's website was the official source of information (and the target to which social media traffic was directed to), social media posts were increasingly how-do-you-do-fellow-kids-ified conversational summaries of that information. The personal bled out of the posts, replaced by official information and committee-approved talking points, all closely following the unified tone of voice set for the organisation.

There was still some air left in the pocket of online fun. Sometimes, a good post went viral. Something funny or heartwarming happened. But more often than not, we were workshopping prefabbed fun and fishing for reactions.

We had stopped talking and started creating content.

Capricious algorithms guiding the discourse (2014–2021)

The dull version of social media was now in place. Teams of professionals writing middle-of-the-road content to platforms that had begun to move from their paradigm-shifting experimentation to copying each other and locking users in as valuable audiences for ads and sources for data extraction.

This is the golden age of the social media manager, the SEO expert, and the junior comms specialist who was too young for Facebook but just right for Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. A whole class of professionals whose unique skillset was in divining the shifting landscape of social media platforms.

We needed people like that because more and more platforms were cropping up, and all the platforms were competing with each other by adding features the others had. Staying up to date with the shallow end of Silicon Valley's decision makers and the fruits of escalating enshittification was a full time job.

But that wasn't all.

In 2014, Twitter began to "diversify" the main feed away from a chronological list of tweets from people you follow and into an algorithmic source of discovery. In 2015, suspicions and accusations about Facebook's algorithmic filter bubbles intensified. In 2016, Instagram changed the default feed to an algorithmically curated one.

What went viral – or what was even visible to any meaningful part of your followers – was increasingly up to algorithmic processes we knew next to nothing about. What we had was a sort of professional folklore or belief system about what sorts of things would bring the great algorithm's blessing. Mostly, we believed in "engagement". Get people to react to your post and you'll curry the favour of the algos. (What counted as reacting was up to debate, and changed almost monthly.)

It wasn't a place to foster fun, quirky or even insightful encounters. What it did foster was trolls, bots, and bad-faith posting.** Dunks, takedowns, reply guys, and a whole malicious industry of weaponized harassment cropped up. It didn't appear out of thin air, but this new environment of escalated capitalism, hard-and-fast software development, and algorithms feeding on discord and engagement were fertile grounds for it to thrive in a way it hadn't before.

It was also what we in the comms trade feared. Nothing ruins your weekend like targeted harassment you have to scrub from your org's socials. Starting discussions used to be the aim of social media communications but now it had become risky. We wanted viral posts because that was the most reliable way to actually get our message out, but we didn't want the thing that invariably followed virality.

If you triggered a Popular Post, you might get nice comments. But you might also get piled on by shitty people. And either way, you had to keep tabs on how the situation developed, with a contingency plan for multiple different scenarios. How to foster the good while weeding out the bad? How to get enough engagement to spread your post on to your followers' feeds but not so much the post breaks containment and attracts the attention of mean randos? How to keep the good conversations going and nip the bad ones in the bud, before they derail everything? What began as basic community management turned into a bad time because of unpredictable algorithms, unprecedented scale, and an honestly baffling lack of even halfway decent moderation tools.

If you were responsible for a big social media account back then, it was like you had to manage the world's biggest open mic, with the worst people invited. Without efficient moderation tools and with measly support from the multinational social media corporations, you had very few alternatives to just being on call 24/7 in case someone decided to go postal on your digital turf.

And this was only if your posts gained traction. Most of the time, only a fraction of your audience even saw your posts.

Our reach was dwindling and on the occasion we caught the wind of virality (or ad budget) to boost it, the social landscape was so toxic the attention we got was almost more trouble than it was worth.

Above all, it was taking more and more resources to maintain a social media presence. But we had all these systems in place! Social media teams, publishing schedules (to keep the algorithms happy, of course), content pipelines! So we told ourselves we had to be where our audiences were.

So, though our ability to control who saw our posts was rapidly diminishing, we kept creating content. By now, close to the 2020s, there was nothing personal left. An organisation's social media account was essentially just another front-facing website, albeit one the comms team had no true control over.

Hellscape (2021–)

It’s an excercise in frustration to describe what the day to day use of commercial social media platforms looks like for organisations today. Comms professionals jump through the most idiotic hoops just to post text and pictures online. What ought to be the simplest form of digital communication online – text and pictures on a webpage – turns into this weird collection of idiosyncracies.

• We spend a lot of time to post the same information on several different platforms, wrangling wildly varying UIs and workflows. Or maybe we use a somewhat shitty service that pushes one message to all those different platforms at the cost of, at best, being at the mercy of a middleman or, at worst, having the message looking a bit out of place on each platform.

• We have subscriptions to linksites and landing pages to facilitate "link in bio" mentions on Instagram posts. This is because you can't use links in Instagram posts. Linkless posts make sense for a social photo album (which Instagram once was) but nobody really uses it that way any more. Now that same functionality (or lack thereof) is used mostly to keep users captive within Instagram and to encourage the use of Instagram Stories (which Insta uses to compete with Snapchat).

• We make different versions of a single photo, one for each platform, because platforms have different optimal sizes, ratios, and cropping standards. Some professionals also pay for services like Canva, one key selling point of which is to offer templates to help manage this whole hassle – that’s two layers of tools for a problem that’s almost too stupid to exist!

• We are wary of making posts too political – even when the very essence of so much of corporate and organisational social media is foundationally political. Sometimes, political content is downright banned, and the moderation decisions on what constitutes “too political” are obtuse. Yet we play along, making sure our org isn’t the nail that sticks out from the rest.

• Running an ad, we are never just running an ad. We are running an ad AND trying to keep up with the byzantine rules platforms enact on ads. Too much text? Not enough text? The colour red is too political? – it’s basically the same optimization roulette we play with the algorithms but with a small monetary offering to grease the wheels.

• We are still forced to use personal social media accounts to manage professional profiles, or portray a professional profile as a personal account (what's the first name of YOUR bureau?), because social media platforms are still rubbish at identity management and branding – the things they ostensibly are made for!

• We kind of just accept that posting on social media is like shouting into the void. Maybe someone hears? Maybe they don't. The metrics say 20 000 people saw a post – but was it worth it?

There are answers to all of these problems. Part of my professional profile and expertise is to deploy these answers so that the orgs I work for in the government and the cultural sector get their dues with social media visibility and use whatever resources they have wisely. That doesn’t mean this situation (and those answers) are the best way to go about This Whole Online Thing.

Daily professional operation of a social media account on commercial social media platforms is miserable, the returns are dwindling, and – hand on heart – after the Fun Years, I have seen zero interesting conversations between people and organisations or brands on social media. ZERO. Sure, there’s something nice every now and again, but honestly nothing I’d miss and nothing a good website and customer support couldn’t have accomplished.

You can absolutely still foster a good community of followers on commercial social media even during this Hellscape era, but increasingly government organisations and cultural institutions lack the resources to do so, and are left with vacuous memery or boilerplate copypaste only a random selection of their followers will ever see. (Ever wonder why so many brands and public services stoop to posting cringy meme slop? It’s not because it’s fun; it’s because it’s a way to play the attention game the way the big social media companies want it to be played.)

And even if government orgs and cultural institutions had massive comms budgets, why should they be used on platforms controlled by amoral billionares? At this point, many organisations keep investing in commercial social media only out of habit.

Which makes me think the only effective, ethical, and sustainable thing to do is to abandon this costly domain and embrace alternatives.

It doesn’t need to be like this

Unless you're in the business of elbowing out competition or maybe operating a dropshipping site with razor thin profit margins, this method of randomized communication commercial algorithmic social media platforms offer just doesn't make a lot of sense.***

A lot of this lingering loyalty to corporate social media arises from the idea we in the comms trade have that organisations need to be where the people are. But are “the people” on social media any more?

There is no "social media" the way there was 15 years ago. No platform conveniently acts as The Place where people are. That was never the case, really, but at least in the heyday of social media, you could use Facebook to reach a reasonably-sized demographic of middle-class moneyspenders. Now, it’s mostly just bots and boomers (the latter of which might still count as moneyspenders but it’s still a very narrow demography).

Comms professionals have responded to this by targeting several social media platforms, all of which have somewhat different core user bases – and all of which have their individual hells of publishing and algorithmic hurdling, requiring specialized knowledge and artisanal management, which in turn requires resources. But even using several different platforms, and even with an adequate number of followers on each of them, you still can’t guarantee that your message is getting through – unless you put your faith in the algorithms and the goodwill of the platforms. Which, frankly, is one hell of a professional stance to have.

There are ways to reach a lot of people online. But the first step towards a better future is realizing that social media is no longer the magic bullet it arguably once – and for a very brief time – was. For many organisations, it's nowadays basically attention lottery: you might reach a lot of people, or you might reach just a handful of randos. You might even reach a lot of the people you never wanted to reach, which is even worse.

If our websites had equally inconsistent performance, we'd never use them! Or at least we'd regard them as broken.

If potential users are a metric to go by, you know what trumps even the social media giants? The internet!

Yes! The internet.

Social media was never great at storing information and after the algorithmic turn it’s viability for day-to-day routine mass comms hasn’t been stellar. Even so, these are the two things social media platforms are most commonly used for by orgs nowadays, and, incidentally, the two things websites are still great at!

We don't need to ditch social media as an official vector for comms, but like we learned back in the early days of the Fun Years, social media is at its best when its for people and for people-sized communication.† It’s literally in the name: social media. It’s not a megaphone you shout into but a place to connect with folks.

Perhaps we ought to stop thinking about social media as media and go back to talking about networks: places like Mastodon are more about social networks than they are about means and methods of communication. Using social media social networks as a repository of information about your organisation or as a one-way delivery mechanism for mass comms is suboptimal. It’s not what social networks were made for, nor is it what they’re good at. And it’s definitely not what commercial social media (which are commodified and captured social networks) are good at, despite the promises made by billionaires.

Instead, have a kick-ass website! Update it often! With all the resources (money, time, people) you save from leaving commercial social media, you could have SUCH A COOL WEBSITE! Elegant, well-structured, up to date, responsive, and accessible!

Maybe throw in a good newsletter, too! Not just regurgitating links but having actual interesting, experimental stuff in it! Or go all in on regurgitating links! Make the newsletter an excercise in minimalism: just links, nothing else. Publish as often as your audience needs. Benchmark the endless supply of weird, personal newsletters published today.

Learn to love RSS, if you don't already.

Look up smaller, human-sized platforms for social networks (see footnote †).

We can have great websites with great official information AND we can have spontaneus, playful, and personal exchanges on social networks. We just need to ditch the billionare-owned commercial cesspools, re-prioritize our comms channels, and remember what social media was for, originally.

The internet can be fun again, and it’s entirely within our power to make it so.

---

* Tone of voice, in various forms, is of course a concept that's as old as written communication: basically, the way your text sounds matters. Can a you swear on company letterhead? Does your brand say "you are important" or "you're important"? It's the need to adjust the tens or hunders or thousands of voices inside an organisation into something that forms a single, unified message. With the advent of social media, however, tone of voice became a very literal thing: if our organisation were a person online, how would they write and interact?

** To be fair, the exact same mechanisms (such as algorithms favouring high-engagement baiting and Twitter's quote tweet that taught users the art of high-visibility sniping and dunking) allowed for a lot of great activism as well. But not nearly in the same numbers as they did for misinformation and general shithousery.

*** Obviously, for some use-cases, corporate social media is probably great! I don’t want to dispute that. People do buy stuff based on the ads they see on social media, so if that’s your goal then that’s probably what you need to do. Obviously, it’s also required for some kinds of publicitiy and PR work, no question about it. Commercial social media is just another tool for comms strategies (albeit an unethical one, at this point). But do bureaus, small NGOs, museums, and cultural organisations with poor resources really need commercial social media? Maybe some do (again, it depends on your goals and overall strategy), but most of them certainly don’t. The problem is, most of the time, commercial social media presence is not really deployed strategically – it’s just the default position that you need to have a presence on commercial platforms.

† OK. Real talk, re: social media. If you really need social media, think about what you use it for.

If you want to post things quick and offer a place where people can talk with you, there are alternatives to commercial social media platforms. For example, Mastodon is a way to post easily, own your identity, and talk with people. Integrate your Mastodon feed to anything you like, such as your website if you want to promote it or use it like a ticker.

Mastodon feels like what social media felt in the '00s. Even if it gains wider traction, its federated nature will likely maintain that feeling. You can have a dry official presence there. Or you can return to a slightly more open style of social media communication. And unlike Twitter and Facebook, federated platforms don't require you to be at the mercy of stockholders and CEOs once the network starts to gain popularity.

If Mastodon feels too radical (it does, after all, require one to accept that joining a social network does not mean you will instantly get access to millions of users but rather need to, well, partake in the building of that social network), you could also look at Bluesky, for a taste of a federated social network that’s more centralized and skeevy than Mastodon but less batshit than X and the Meta platforms.

There are also a variety of robust message board solutions for all the orgs out there who say they need Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups for light customer support. No need to go to commercial social media for that – and more to the point, no need to force your audience to join those platforms either!

Hell, comms professionals have largely missed the online paradigm shift towards platforms like Discord that provide what I would in short call an online watering hole. A sort of instanced common room that’s more than a chatroom or a forum but less than a full-blown social network platform. This sort of comms structure isn’t necessarily well-suited for public orgs or cultural institutions, but it’s nevertheless a massive change in online behaviour that comms professionals rarely talk about or even really acknowledge.

In all of this, the key to good social network use is to remain people-sized. Social networks should not be the main driver of your comms strategy! Or the primary customer support vector! (Unless, of course, you’re doing something where they are essential – but, again, very few of us are.)

Social networks are the weird back channel. A lab where you can workshop stuff. Something extra you keep around for experimentation and additional boost. They allow you to do things you can't do anywhere else online but that means they also totally suck for some other things. Those other things are better done elsewhere, such as on websites or newsletters. They’re the channels that can be scaled way beyond people-sized. They can easily provide services to millions of people. Well beyond the point after which a social network becomes practically Just Another Website for you.

When you think about the most useful or fun use-cases for social networks, it’s always something small and, for a lack of a better word, “real”. It’s a post about irregular opening hours, much like a sign you’d hang onto your shop window. It’s a fun post about something relatable that shows the human side of the organisation. It’s a piece of information that is personally relevant to the recipient. All of those use cases call for a smaller, person-sized approach to social networks, an none of them benefit from algorithmic scale-tipping. Thus, places like Mastodon have a flow of communication that’s quieter and maybe a bit more chaotic than its corporate competitors, but also have more heart and, consequently, more impact.

What Mastodon doesn't have is hostages a massive concentrated userbase, so if playing the engagement lottery is required, you can always play the devils' own game and throw money at commercial social media platforms. Have a Facebook/X/Insta account that does little else than publish ads and the minimum of “content”. Have it direct traffic to your real comms vectors like your website and newsletter. Keep it as a calling card, there to be found or handed out, rather than a destination in itself. You can game the algos with minimal presence and a savvy budget, all the while keeping everything else on your own site, or on a social network like Mastodon which you can control yourself.

Give the commercial giants some money but keep your labour and your tools for yourself. You truly can have the cake and eat it too.

Having said all that, one option is to drop all social networks altogether and go all-in on, for example, your website, newsletter, and online marketing. Because even when you think you “really need social media”, I think you oftentimes really don’t. For many, it’s just a shorthand for “I want a place where I can easily reach a lot of people for free”. And that, increasingly, is no longer what (commercial) social media is good for, as far as organisations are concerned: it’s no longer particularly easy, you rarely reach a lot of people, and all of it requires either money or pandering to the algos, neither of which is particularly ethical these days.

And, most damningly of all, social media never reached the whole breadth of our audiences anyway. Commercial social media platforms have only ever catered to a subset, or subsets of our audiences; culturally relatively homogenous slices of demographics outside of which we must reach regardless of our use commercial social media platforms.

Simply put, we have to do better, and commercial social media isn’t helping.

A story about pirating videogames in the 1990s

In the '90s, when I was about 10 years old, there was this old shop that sold household appliances in my city. The shop was kind of run down and honestly a little off-putting, so I had never visited it.

But my friend had heard that they sold Amiga games. Cheap Amiga games.

Now, this was the era of casual software piracy. Even more casual than the torrenting scene of the 00's.

I sometimes bought new videogames but the vast majority of my 100 or so floppies were copied from friends.

If a friend or a friend of a friend had a new game, we all popped over with a box of floppies and copied it for ourselves. Or a friend would bring a copy of a game as a gift, sort of like what we did with mixtapes as teenagers.

I would sometimes buy games legally, of course, but buying games as a kid was by no means easy. Information about new games was scarce and my small city had no shops that carried Amiga games. Buying Amiga games meant I had to go to a bigger city or orded via mail. Neither of which was possible without money and help from my parents.

But now - now there was this decrepit mom and pop store that allegedly sold Amiga games. What a treasure trove!

So me and my friend gathered our savings and went to the store. It was run by an old married couple [erroneus memory warning: maybe not a couple, maybe there just were two adult shopkeepers when I visited] I would years later learn to associate with the BBC comedy horror sitcom The League of Gentlemen's shopkeepers Tubbs and Edward. A very Royston-Vasey-ass local shop for local people.

Surprisingly, there were no games. Only old washing machines, stereo equipment, and VCRs. When my friend asked about the games, the owners took us to a back room. An office, I guess. I was a kid but I'd watched enough TV to suspect the implications of a literal backroom deal.

The owners produced a floppy storage box full of disks that were obviously copied. Handwritten labels, no price tags. They told us the price would depend on how many we bought.

I remember being amazed at how the container box was almost identical to the one I had at home. You know – my stash of illicit software. My friend began to browse the games but I started to get cold feet. If this were Miami Vice we’d be the bad guys! And also: I loved authentic games for their colourful boxes, manuals, and disks that weren't so prone to data corruption. If I was going to buy a game, I expected it to come with all that extra glam!

I was disappointed. Why would I pay for something the shopkeepers probably hadn't paid for themselves? It felt unfair in a very schoolyard sort of a way. Like, Tubbs and Edward were trying to crank out a profit from what was essentially our grassroots hobby. Illegal hobby, yes, but at least we kept it free.

I had enough decorum and timidness not to ask directly whether they were actually selling pirated games. Instead I asked if they'd also give us the box and manual if we bought a game from them. I remember them suddenly being very cross with me. Like I'd done something wrong.

One of them escorted me to the front of the shop and told me they wouldn't sell games to me. My friend bought a few games and I must've waited for him outside the store, feeling like I'd ruined something or broken a rule. I was so mortified by the experience that I have no memory of how I actually got out of the shop.

I felt bad for missing out on some new videogames but also morally proud in a way I didn't have words for back then.

Also, my FOMO about new videogames was somewhat lessened by the fact that at least one of the games my friend bought was corrupted beyond repair before he could load it up once.

I never went back to the store and I have no idea how long they kept doing their Amiga side hustle. But to this day I sometimes think back on the old couple in their backroom selling corrupted warez for pocket change.

What a time!

Abzû (2016)

I’ve had Abzû sitting on my PS4’s hard drive since 2016. As a game made by many of the alumni of thatgamecompany, makers of beautiful indie games like Flower and Journey, it was an immediate purchase. I wanted to see where those kinds of games would go next.

I started Abzû back in 2016 but never finished it. Probably because despite sharing so much with Flower and Journey it’s not as atmospheric or as tightly designed. It had Austin Wintory’s music and Matt Nava’s art direction but something was missing. One obvious missing piece was Jenova Chen’s design, but somehow the game’s shortcomings felt even more profound. Like it lacked heart. Back then, Abzû was a disappointment.

But now! With the benefit of nearly a decade’s worth of distance I didn’t compare Abzû to Flower or Journey any longer. I just wanted a short game to fill a lazy sunday afternoon with. And it turns out Abzû is actually pretty good! Not novel like Flower or absolutely paradigmatic like Journey. But pretty good!

It’s mostly just about diving around in different colourful sea environments. Very chill, and just when you think the game has nothing more to offer… well, turns out it does.

In the current game development landscape where many games take closer to a decade to make, Abzû is a refreshing snack. A polished, beatiful game made in three years and played through in around 2 hours. Even if it did take me a decade to actually finish it.

From indie darlings to hang out games

What made me bounce off Abzû in 2016 was it’s lack of aesthetic and affective profoundness which were key components of Flower and Journey, respectively. Now, however, I realize Abzû isn’t – or shouldn’t be read as being – in the same genre as thatgamecompany’s games. Abzû is actually more akin to hang out games like A Short Hike and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. Pretty, quirky, short, and focused on just hanging around in little digital spaces. Abzû was made and marketed in the image of thatgamecompany’s more profound predecessors but I don’t feel less for the game for eventually being something else.

In 2016, I hadn’t really identified hang out games as a genre. And it’s not like I still have, exactly. It’s more of a vibe than anything else, based on ongoing discussions and a vague sense of slow genre shifts in videogames and their production.

Hang out games are a loose group of (often indie) games I’ve learned to recognize via their broad mechanics such as sandboxiness (but, like, small sandboxiness so maybe litterboxiness?), bite-sizedness, atmosphere, simplicity and various visual cues arising from all of the aforementioned. It’s like a cognitive schema for what some games look and feel like; a tool to use when thinking about games, basically, rather than a clear category of games and experiences. And I’m happy Abzû contributed another entry into that personal mental catalogue!

Sometimes all you need is a place to play in

There is a more cynical reading here, too, of course. Of a game that takes the beauty of earlier novel experiences and packages it into a lesser thing, in accordance with the the dominant commercial aesthetic of the 2010s. But that would feel unfair: at its heart Abzû is a nice little mood piece, perfect to play with your kids, if only to show them that you can hang out with, and in, videogames. That videogames are pretty and weird and gentle, and that oceans hold a whole world’s worth of beauty worth fighting for.

It’s not what Abzû was made for, I think, but it’s what it has become, almost a decade after its release. A fantasy of a place where you can spend a while playing in peace amidst a burning world.

Office Blade Runner

Video meetings and the proliferation of LLM chat interfaces have introduced a new point of tension for organizations. I call it "guess the robot", and it works like this.

In a meeting where everyone is pitching ideas or ways of proceeding with something, you notice someone is being extra prolific. Like, sudden bursts of highly thought out responses. Not just reacting to proposed ideas but proposing like 5 new ideas and a few new angles that tangentially touches upon what you're discussing.

It's not just someone being enthusiastic or someone working under a fresh dose of caffeine. It's like someone were processing and outputting information at a higher capacity, but working on a set of facts oddly removed from the realities of your organization and the meeting at hand.

That person is, of course, feeding prompts into ChatGPT (or equivalent) and passing off the results as their own takes. And, look, generative AI is good enough to make sort of passable suggestions. But when you pull from ChatGPT which has NO DATA on your organization's ability to follow up on ideas, and bring with you a torrent of new actionable (but pretty mid) ideas, it only floods the discussion and bogs down everything.

If everyone is already working at close to full capacity, it doesn't help to rush in with overachieving mediocrity. I'd take one brilliant (and realistically doable) idea over a buffet of kind-of-ehhs any day! This method of "increasing productivity" quantitatively but not qualitatively is bonkers!

It's weird sitting in a meeting trying to intuit who's augmenting their takes with AI suggestions. I never imagined being an office blade runner doing realtime Voight-Kampff heuristics to identify the robot in the room but here we are.

The Rule Book – Thoughts That Stuck

I recently finished reading The Rule Book: The Building Blocks of Games by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola (2024). You can find the open access version on the MIT Press website.

It’s an altogether great introduction to what rules in games and play are and how they work. Just very good all around! (If you’re looking for a more critical take, see Jonne Arjoranta’s great critique. In principle I agree with all of it, but I think for the kind of book The Rule Book is, it’s very good as it is.)

Here’re some thoughts that stuck with me.

Rooie rules

I enjoyed the discussion on “playing nice”. It’s mostly done via Linda Hughes’s 1983 essay “Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why are Rooie Rules nice?” which is a great anthropological examination of kids playing Foursquare. It made me reflect on my own attitude towards rules, and also got me to realize that I basically always prefer to play by Rooie rules.

In fact, me and my wife now regularly refer to Rooie rules whenever discussing rules in any games we play or watch.

This is why I love reading academic works: they give me words and concepts to understand (and sometimes change) what I’m doing. Sure, I’ve always favored playing nice, but the discussion about Rooie rules in The Rule Book and Hughes’s article gave that feeling a lot more nuance and structure!

The Rooie rules (named so after one of the players) were basically a shorthand for a set of rules that codified nice play and an expectation to a somewhat general amicability between players. You COULD play competitively but only insofar as it made sense in the current “nice” context of the game. Basically, nothing bad is permitted unless it fits into the wider framewok of nice play (and its social performance) as understood and negotiated by players.

For example, you could hit the ball real hard and make an exceptionally competitive move, but only if it doesn’t upset others, disrupt the game flow, or appear blatantly antisocial. The Rooie rules were a shorthand for a collective, shared good time; “playful collusion” as Hughes calls it.

And like so many things on the playground (as well as in life), it only lasted until being challenged by selfish assholes:

“Rooie rules and playing nice worked well until boys, who played closer to the letter of the rules and did not subscribe to the idea of playing nice, joined the game” (p. 95).

A nicer way to put it would be that the two groups didn’t have a shared understanding of the rules, but it does also neatly demonstrate how so many nice things are super fragile in the face of open hostility – the existence of a challenge to the niceness kind of shreds the psychological bubble of safety regardless of whether the challenge succeeds or not. That’s a lesson learned with assholes the world over, on playgrounds, sports, and internet forums alike.

Bouldering

My beloved sport of bouldering is mentioned in Chapter 5: Material Rules. It’s used to illustrate the combination of rules and the material environments of play. That is, unlike tennis or football, bouldering does not rely on strictly reproducible or singular arenas of play: every route is different and its rules of traversal and possible affordances of action are, basically, encoded in the stone.

The formal rules of (outdoor) bouldering are actually very limited. You figure out and follow a “line” up a rock face or a boulder, which establishes or completes a route. And the route can be climbed using any bodily techniques and moves at the climbers’ disposal. Simple!

But here, the climbing surface becomes "a material embodiment of the rules" (p. 149) that guides the actions of climbers and invites an endless variety of moves and routes within the general paradigm of "climbing".

Climbing is not unique in this, of course. But it does mean that when looked at in this way, climbing and e.g. downhill cycling are more alike, structurally, than downhill cycling and track cycling. It’s about the effect the playing surface has on the actions of the players and the rules enacted.

It’s a combination of rules and nature that creates the sport.

This makes indoor bouldering especially interesting, since indoors the routes are not random but handcrafted and designed: they are constructed from holds intended to be used in particular ways, by routesetters whose work is not dissimilar to that of game designers’.

Indoors, the sport loses some of its variety but gains a curious dialogue between the climber and the routesetter. It’s a dialogue built on the material environment of play which, in climbing gyms, at once simulates the natural routes outside but also shifts them into a more regulated and, arguably, more playful variant.

Instead of facing the natural world with a playful attitude (taking a rock face and scaling it as a challenge), indoors both the route and the act of climbing are manifestations of play (creating a problem and then solving it). This makes for a sort of metagame of climbing where climbing and routesetting styles change over the years, and climbers and manufactures of climbing holds and climbing equipment react to these by coming up with new techniques, holds, and tools (and vice versa).

I think there’s a lot to discuss about the current state of indoor sport climbing through the lens of controlled variables and design space as codified into the environment of play: the material surface of play as embodying the rules as well as acts of climbing.

Rules and bodies

There’s a nice brief subchapter in the book about rules, gender, and sports (“May the Best ‘Man’ Win”), perhaps best summarized by this passage:

“While sports medicine has had a long history of treating sex as a binary brute fact, the reality is more complicated” (p. 167).

I haven't got a lot to say about this other than that I'd wish anyone saying anything about the topic had read – at the very least – this subchapter.

A good paragraph

“A ludologist truly wanting to understand a game must understand both the practical dimension of priority of different rule categories for the game and how the less obvious rule categories relate to play. On paper, truth or dare has very little to do with external regulation—but in practice, the very point of the game is to subvert social codes of surrounding society.” (p. 177)

Heck yeah!!

Beautiful rules

Stenros and Montola (briefly, alas) also approach the beauty of rules, and suggest the game of go has the most beautiful rule for ending the game: “The game ends when both sides agree that there will be no more moves” (p. 193).

And indeed, sometimes a rule is just SO GOOD. Often it’s so because it’s efficiently phrased and leads to delightful outcomes. Go’s ending rule suggests harmony, balance, and respect. It’s very nice!

But this got me thinking about other similarly affective rule snippets. I love Blood on the Clocktower’s rule of “If you talk over new players you might die in the night” (via Shut Up and Sit Down).

Also, the chill and rigorously non-violent animal-folk adventure RPG Wanderhome has a character class called the Veteran, whose core rules are “You have a sword, sheathed at your hip. You can unsheathe it whenever you want. You must never unsheathe it.” The Veteran also has the ability to, at any time, draw their sword and kill anyone in front of them. The player must then retire the character forever.

This is… a lot in a gameworld the rules describe as a place without violence.

It’s such a heavy thing to hold in your mind and at the table! Even when you never ever ever intend to use the ability, knowing that it’s there gnaws at you like a memory from a painful past. Which, really, is the whole point of the Veteran, which makes this rule so great.

Also! Many Potter-ish live action role-playing games (many of which are no longer set in the actual Wizarding World, because yeesh) have a rule where you can basically cast any spell you wish upon anyone else, but it is the target of the spell who decides what happes: maybe the spell misses, maybe they reflect it, or maybe it has a surprising result.

It's like the "yes, and…" rule of improvisational comedy: it enables actions to build off of each other while shutting out bad play.

This is something I’ve taught my kids. Magic duels are all the rage at playgrounds these days, and nothing stops play faster than one kid casting killing curses and everyone else either getting upset or casting impenetrable barriers (or getting stuck in endless loops of counterspells).

I saw that happen so many times and it always just kind of gave a bad vibe to an otherwise fun activity.

Having the target decide the outcome makes magic less bossy and so much more magical!

Addendum 2.2.2025

As an addendum to the thoughts I wrote down last year, having had more time to think about The Rule Book and to see how it’s lodged itself into my personal ontology, I have this to say:

The title of the book is a trap! This is not, actually, a rule book. It proposes a sort of analytical framework for rules (rules for rules, if you will), which I first thought was one of its strong points.

But like all truly interesting academic works, it’s strength is not in its most immediate offer. Those taxonomies and categories of rules are nice to go back to every once in a while, but the book is, above all, an object to think with. To borrow from Goffman (sorry, game studies people, I know), it keys you into a particular mindset towards rules: to see familiar things in a new light and to stay sensitive to not just rules as a procedural layer of culture and interaction but as a nuanced and multi-tiered domain in itself. And it’s this refocusing paired with a mindset pervasive throughout the book – analytical, open, mischievous, gentle, and critical – that has stayed with me far longer than the actual analytical framework the authors propose.

I expected this book to be a wrench but it was a workshop instead, and that’s the highest order of compliment I can give to any scholarly work.

State of the Generation

I was drafting a relatively low-stakes document for work, so I thought it'd be an interesting avenue for seeing how ChatGPT could help in spitballing the text.

I've messed around with LLM applications a bit before but I thought I could now try and incorporate one into my writing process properly.

I found out that:

1. ChatGPT is very good a suggesting a variety of ideas and angles that seem professional and well thought out.

2. Most of these ideas come roughly from a single creatively sterile business/corporation viewpoint – like reading variations of an especially trite LinkedIn post. You can change this by fiddling around with the prompt, but everything is still pretty boring and generic.

3. None of the suggestions made by ChatGPT were particularly useful. I need to produce a piece of writing that's at least marginally interesting, and none of ChatGPTs suggestions had any traction beyond, again, a boring LinkedIn post. There's a huge market for Garbage Professional Text (GPT, heh) but I have no use for it.

4. I hoped ChatGPT would've functioned as a catalyst: even bad suggestions could lead to good ideas. The smooth-brained and sterile dribble ChatGPT cranked out wasn't it, though, even if it all sounded very convincing.

5. If you want a formalized tool, Eno's "Oblique Strategies" scratches a similar itch but is way better, since you usually get your creativity flowing from the get-go. There’s also a great bot that pulls a random Oblique Strategies card a few times a day. It has saved my professional bacon many times!

The point is: if you want to write honest, interesting things with some real soul, the process is just as important as the end result. There's a lot more of "you" in the work than you'd think, even if what you're writing is a piece of fairly rote PR stuff or whatever. You CAN cut corners, but by doing so you're also making your work more boring.

If capitalism requires you to pump out crap super fast, then ChatGPT is great, and that's a big part of the problem right there.

I'm not saying ChatGPT or other LLMs wouldn't be a huge thing for everyday writing especially in corporate and bureaucratic environments in the future – much like spellcheck and automatic formatting help out (and fuck shit up) in the professional everyday all the time nowadays. I can totally see how I could benefit from an "AI helper" or whatever, but, you know… Ehhhhh.

In summary, for now, I still regard ChatGPT as a mediocre tool for creativity (and a dangerously great tool for faking proficiency), and so far my writing process is too important for the final output to sacrifice it for the speed and platitudes of automation.