Ask what you can give

I was listening to the Dive Club podcast with Flora Guo as a guest. There were a lot of memorable moments, but the one that really stuck was her idea that designers should treat the internet the way a good host treats a room. Ask what you can give rather than what you can get: notes, artifacts, events you put on. She makes things for her friends as gifts. That sat with me for a few weeks without anywhere to go.

Then I was invited to an onsite. A design workshop, lunch, then four back-to-back conversations. Six people over four hours. I could have sent one email with six individual thank-you notes in it. I thought of Flora instead and wanted to make this a gift too. The day was memorable and I wanted to give that back as something memorable.

I built a game: a small version of the office, with the different teams I got to meet and learn from that day. It's an isometric floor you walk around in the browser. Someone meets you at the entrance, welcomes you in and tells you how to move, and then you walk the building and leave a note with each person, each of them standing about where I met them. A table by the door keeps every note you've handed over so you can read them again.

Afterwards I turned it into Thank-you Arcade, a version anyone can use. You build your own office, write a note for each person, and send it as a link or a single file. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. The office below is the demo.

I designed the office and the walk-through, and built it with Claude Code. It’s open source, so you can make your own.

Resources

Play the demo. Arrow keys or WASD, space to talk, T to change the palette.

Make your own, or read the code on GitHub.