# the philosophical problem with s&box terrible user interfaces and the threat of playbor thinking again about the glaring emptiness of s&box (the successor to gmod.) i can't be the only one to have noticed. gmod was barely a garme despite being somewhat fun in brief spurts how can one then possibly 'expand' on something already so empty? glaring emptiness already expansive.. in fact you can't get any bigger than nothingness. it's like a garme without a soul - a complicated toolbox in search of a house to build. sure that's the point you can indeed build a house or pretty much anything else with the s&box toolbox / platform.. but there simply doesn't seem any compelling reason to do so. i want to build a house because it would be nice to live there. in s&box however i could build absolutely anything but almost immediately end up constructing next to nothing in fact the whole garme-platform thing seems a load of hard work. 'playbor.' what if i don't want to be forced to build stuff? i don't want to bother learning how to build-stuff. i just want to play with interesting premade systems which hook up in cool ways. maybe s&box is too low level for me. i want something much more basic easy (and immediate) to interact with. a bunch of lego pieces sure - but ones that interact meaningfully in interesting amusing and often unexpected ways. what i don't want is to just mess around in an empty sandbox virtually welding a bunch of rubbish together which them immediately ends up being disappointing naff and entirely non-functional an example: too friends are on the same server - in the same space - and are currently each making ir own whatever thing with no shared ideas. what happens if they'd suddenly like whatever they've built to meaningfully interact with what the other person's constructed? for sbox the only thing it can offer is for these two separate systems to be in the same arbitrary space. that's a major problem with s&box space; it feels arbitrary. not that every space needs a narrative hook but in s&box there's very little opportunity for _emergent narrative_ to occur even trying to figure out how s&box works as a platform at the interface level when it loads on steam is frankly baffling and absurdly time consuming. whoever designed the s&box interface either did a bad job or maybe even no job at all - since they along already know how it operates just fine thanks. the user interface equivalent of 'git gud' the rallying cry of the imagination free but that's just it; why should i take any time whatsoever 'learn' to (for example) make a rocket chair that i can sit on and fly about in? (is there anything interesting to do _in the meantime_ while i'm learning? something interesting happening in the background?) why can't s&box present itself as a series of interesting potential choices from a limited but expressive palette? currently however it only _thinks_ it presents a series of interesting choices. but there are far too many and they're far too complex to come across as anything other than an endless time sink for nerds. only nerds currently find s&box interesting; everyone else just yawns with the prospect of facing such a steep learning curve in fact the s&box curve doesn't even curve; it starts at the top and just stays there. there is no easy mode. at least with lego it's immediately apparent how blocks fit together. with s&box you don't even know what's going on what the whole dealio is! it's utterly confusing - but that confusion appears to directly stem from the fact s&box has next to zero identity; it has no idea what it is because it imagines it can be absolutely anything and everything to anyone. (much like star citizen.) oh dear. it cannot and so ends up being almost nothing. there don't seem enough clear hard limits on what s&box as a garme-platform-whatever is and isn't this doesn't seem a matter of merely tweaking one's initial marketing pitch but rather reconceptualizing the entire thing from scratch. yes one could certainly improve the user interface to 'make things more clear' - but what exactly are kind of ideas are at work behind the clarity being expressed? what's the design philosophy behind s&box? (because right now it doesn't appear to have much if any.) and 'building on previous successes' really isn't cutting it garry since what exactly did gmod get right? it isn't at all clear as facepunch assumes andor imagines it is some key words that might help s&box evolve **+** evolution **+** energy **+** boundaries **+** agents i'll have to chat to robert yang about this-kind-of-thing // republic of bob