There’s an approach/aesthetic of design/engineering/problem-solving which I want to talk about. I’m calling it “just let go” design; the general theme is that the designer/engineer/problem-solver gives up control over the details of the solution.

This post is mostly a list of examples to show the breadth of the concept, ranging from Minecraft to tvtropes to price controls to mutation-assisted breeding to jurisprudence to SQL, with a baby lamb in a bag somewhere in the middle. The next post will zoom out and discuss requirements and advantages of the approach.

Examples

Games

Standard advice for a role-playing game master (GM): don’t railroad the players. There’s some wiggle room in how much the GM keeps players on an intended plot line, but the main rule is that a GM should never blatantly squash players’ creativity just because it wrecks the intended plot. Intelligent characters want to throw your plot out the window; squashing that creativity wrecks the fun.

Taken to an extreme, the opposite of railroading players is to create a sandbox game: think Minecraft or a Falling Sands game. Such games give players near-total freedom to build whatever they want; the game just supplies a canvas.

From a design perspective, one interesting property of sandbox games is that they take relatively little effort to create, yet appeal to a wide audience. Wikipedia lists Minecraft as the second best-selling video game ever; third place goes to Grand Theft Auto V. The number of lines of code in those two games is ambiguous, but GTA probably has well over 10x more code based on any apples-to-apples comparison.

Toys

Back in my day, before minecraft, we played with physical blocks called “legos”.

Lego experimented with a foray into less sandboxy products back in the early 00’s; they tried contracts with popular media franchises (e.g. Harry Potter), and creating their own media (e.g. Bionicle). Sales fell. Eventually, they turned around and went in the exact opposite direction, creating extra-sandboxy products. Those sold like hotcakes.

App Design

The rise of mobile has made app/website “flows” the main design structure: users go through a linear series of screens, one after the other. It’s railroading, but for apps and websites.

What would a more sandbox-ish alternative look like? One example is TvTropes. Art school folks may poo-poo the design, but the site is popular and notoriously addict...

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