Google did something recently that made me smile.

I opened my web browser, only to realize that I was not connected to the internet, and I was shown this screen:

I took this screenshot from Google Chrome. Disconnect from your wifi and try it.

Do you see the instruction at the top? Press space to play.

So I pressed space, and I played.

Google has designed a game that requires no internet connection, uses one key (the spacebar), and only shows up in a moment of frustration.

It’s brilliant and I think it can teach us a few things.

**

Joy is lightweight.

This game is simple, both in play and design. To be clear, I don’t think it could be any simpler. You can experience the joy of it almost instantly. Instantaneous feels like the right speed for joy. For something to be experienced that quickly, it has to be lightweight.

I have no idea how complicated this game was to design and enable, but I would venture a guess that it sparked from a moment of joy. When you’re driven by joy to create an experience, the joy flows seamlessly to the experiencer.

**

Surprise is deceptively powerful.

When I realized that I was not connected to the internet, I was not expecting to be able to play a game. It surprised me in such a positive way that I was instantly inspired to write about the experience.

Creating a surprise requires empathy. You have to know what someone’s expectations are, and only then can you know how to invert those expectations. Creating a positive surprise requires you to purposely invert someone’s expectations for the better.

You have to walk their path first, then choose when to insert a cute jumping dinosaur.

**

Play is a first principle.

There’s a line about play that I love from George Leonard’s The Way of Aikido:

Play precedes culture. It extends beyond the rational, beyond abstraction, beyond matter. Play, in short, is irreducible.

What does Google gain by creating this? I can’t imagine it’s hoping that some random blogger will write a niche post about it. It certainly can’t be for the money. So what’s it for? Well, that’s probably the wrong question. Play extends beyond the rational.

Play is done for the sake of itself.

Minimal two-colour graphic-novel illustration of a small dinosaur leaping over a tall cactus in a sparse desert landscape, inspired by Chrome’s offline dinosaur game.

The Jumping Dinosaur