One button, one bubble, and the whole future off to the right. Everything below is detail — honestly, you could close this now and just play. Come back when something bites you.
Press and hold — the SPACE BAR, the DOWN ARROW, a mouse button, or a finger held anywhere on the screen — and your bubble turns heavy and drops. Let go and it floats back up. That's the entire control scheme. I promise there is no hidden second button.
The trick is to ride the hills the way a skier would: hold on the way down a slope to gather speed, let go just before the bottom, and the next slope throws you into the sky. Land gently on a downhill slope — moving the way it tilts — and you'll hear a chime. Keep landing like that and the chimes climb a scale, your EXUBERANCE multiplier grows (up to ×9.9), and the game quietly starts to sing. This takes about three runs to find, and it's worth all three. A smaller pleasure while you practice: skim just above a hillside without touching it, and the game pays you a little +♥ for the nerve.
One rule worth holding onto: floating and gliding can never hurt you. Diving can — hold all the way into the ground and the bubble cracks. So does a bite from a risk you ignored. Three cracks end the run (five in gentle mode). So when in doubt, do nothing. Surprisingly good advice, in the game and in general.
The YEAR is how far you've come — it's the score. The pink bar is HUMAN FLOURISHING, and it's really the whole game: it leaks away as the pace of change rises, and it refills when you look after the things you meet (watch for the +♥ signs). If it empties, the lights go out. Push it past 100 and the future starts blooming — literally: flowers appear, and every flower you ever grow joins the meadow on the title screen, forever.
PACE only ever climbs on its own. That's not a flaw — that's the thesis. But you can push back: hold SHIFT, or rest two fingers on the screen, and the world slows down on purpose — the kind of pause people take together when a technology is moving faster than the questions. You'll see it: SLOWING DOWN TO THINK spreads across the sky. Time slows so you can look around, the pace of change genuinely drops and stays dropped for a good while, the hype cools off, and the things that bite bite softer — because this time, you saw them coming. It costs flourishing the whole time you hold it, because thinking time isn't free. It's still the best deal in the game.
And mind the dashed line high in the sky — the hype line. Soar above it and the bubble inflates: bigger, floatier, more fragile, and flourishing drains fast up there. Stay too long and it pops, and nothing will have burst the bubble but the bubble.
The wide-eyed blobs are orphan risks — risks nobody has claimed yet. Hold your button as you roll past one and you adopt it: it gets a name, trails behind you like a duckling, and will one day take a hit meant for you. Fly past it instead and it burrows underground... then returns a few hills later with teeth. That's a bite: it knocks the bubble like a crash, takes a real chunk of flourishing, and the end-of-run card will tell you exactly what it took: trust, dignity, the quiet. From era 4, some blobs carry cameras or antennas — nastier than the plain ones if ignored, but adopt them and the paparazzo's flash starts defending you, and the trending one lends you a permanent tailwind. Keep eight pets, and adopting a ninth graduates your eldest, with a gift.
The scribbly fires are moral panics, and attention is their fuel. Touch one and it flares up and comes after you. Fly past without touching and it dies down on its own — and flourishing grows a little. Three of them marching together is a mob. Never hug a mob.
The diamond signs are risks with names — DEEPFAKE SCANDAL, DATA BREACH, and friends. Hold your button at the moment you hit one and you've managed it (+♥). Coast into it slack-thumbed and it costs you dearly. Or fly over it entirely, if you can.
The crates are emerging technologies. Catch one and a five-second timer starts; when it runs out, the technology deploys wherever you happen to be — so where you are is the decision. On the ground: tech for good — flowers, +♥♥. Above the hype line: RUSHED TO MARKET — a burst of speed and a year gained now, new problems hatching downstream. Some of these technologies are real, some are almost real, and some are nonsense. I'm not telling you which is which. Being unsure is the point.
The golden ? is serendipity. Touch it and something good happens. Never the same thing twice.
The grey sludge pools in the deepest valleys, drags at your speed, and eats flourishing while you wade. Build speed and fly over the top of it.
And from era 5, the black swans: two honks, and then it's on you. A pet will throw itself in the way, if you have one. Pass close by without touching, and the near miss pays two full years.
Medals arrive at 10, 25, 50, 100, and 250 hills: DISRUPTION, AWARENESS, AGILITY, RESILIENCE, DIGNITY. The last one is worth seeing.
Survive long enough and the world itself turns — the colors, the board, the doodles, the music — through THE AGE OF DEEP WATER, THE LONG DUSK, and THE AGE OF STRANGE LIGHTS. Past year 3000, arrive at any century still flourishing and a door opens to the post-scarcity future: the drain stops, the panics retire, and only the ground still counts. Records earned there wear ✿. And the story does have an ending — a good one, at year 4000. Bring everything you have grown.
Press T (or tap the purple band on the title screen) and you'll play TODAY'S FUTURE — the identical future everyone in the world is playing today, under the same name. Your daily best is kept separately, and the end-of-run card grows a copy chip, for comparing results with people you enjoy arguing with.
field notes is the bestiary of everything you've met so far. the ideas behind this is where the game came from. sound is sound. gentle mode ☁ makes the whole game kinder — built for younger players, and there's no shame in it. marginalia ✎ lets the professor's stray thoughts drift by mid-run; catching one earns a sparkle, a chime, and absolutely nothing else — which is somehow still the best trade in the game. And the board, top-center, is the worldwide leaderboard — pseudonyms only, and a run is posted only when you choose to, from the end-of-run card. One warning that matters: press-and-hold your best-year line and the game starts forgetting everything. It shows you a progress bar so you have time to change your mind.
SPACE / ↓ — the button · SHIFT — steady · P or ESC — pause (on a phone: a quick two-finger tap) · T — today's future · N — field notes · H — this page · M — sound · B — music · F — fullscreen
A towel waits at hill 42. A quantum duck stands near year 2120 — est. 2020, off by a century on purpose. A robot starts waving around 2057 and does not stop; you will see it again. Somewhere in the mid-2100s, reality resyncs — it is almost certainly nothing. Somewhere in the 2400s, a very large ship passes, very politely; fly up and say hello. At year 2742, against considerable odds: a whale, and some petunias. The century banners tell a long story about jetpacks — it ends in forgiveness. Tap the sun three times and the future gets friendlier: the sun smiles, and your records wear ☀, because honesty is mandatory. Leave the title screen alone for 22 seconds and someone waves at you. In the AI era, some of the background doodles are pencils, drawing the world. And there is always a coffee ring on the whiteboard. There has to be.
This generation of the game also keeps a small pool of wonders — a bench, a cold pool, a man in a white suit, an elephant made of leaves, and a handful more. At most one appears per run, and most runs carry none, so meeting one means something. The weather has private moods too. And if you do nothing at all for twelve seconds, the game notices, kindly. That's all you're getting from me — some things are better found than told.
HYPERBUBBLE is a one-button game that's inspired by navigating powerful new technologies in a complex world while ensuring future human flourishing. It's designed to be simple to play while sparking curiosity, experimentation and wonder (and you'll need all three to get the most out of it). Devised and coded by Claude Fable 5, and based on the work, thinking, and initiatives of ASU Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions Andrew Maynard.
HYPERBUBBLE started as an idle moment of speculation while I was exploring Anthropic's Fable 5 AI model. I was in between more complex (and serious) projects, and maximizing use of Fable before my access ran out. Wanting to test its capabilities in coding a simple web-based game, I asked it to research my work and come up with something inspired by it that was simple, fun, and with gameplay that kept you coming back.
HYPERBUBBLE is the result. In some ways it's nothing special — the world is overflowing with simple AI-generated games. What was interesting to me though was the process, and how the game taps into my work in very specific ways. It also provides some insight into how Fable 5 works. Plus, I must confess to loving the game!
After my initial request, Fable did a deep research dive into my work, created five game-designer agents to come up with different concepts, passed these through a panel of three AI judges, and selected the winning (AI-generated) proposal.
After the first draft — which Fable debugged, tested, and checked using an impressive array of sub-agents — it began working earnestly with me to come up with the final product, refining the goals, gameplay, and feel along the way. This resulted in version 1.0 of the game and represented over 20 iterations.
Version 1.0 was originally published on July 10 and featured on the Future of Being Human Substack. However, not content to leave things as they were, I then started to work in earnest with Fable on a version 2.0 that expanded the gameplay substantially, and the ideas and experiences that a player encounters, and then progressed to a version 3.0!
The game is now on version 4 and is considerably more mature than that first iteration, even down to having a leaderboard. It represents over 80 iterations of the initial html file that Fable produced, and has a far greater steer from me than version 1.0 did. However, the fundamentals and implementation still belong to the sometimes-quirky and often unexpected "creative mind" of Fable 5.
That said, the game is intentionally simple. And there are many aspects of it that are still begging to be tweaked and refined. But it still brings a smile to my face every time I play :)
The overall aesthetic is based on my crudely hand-drawn Risk Bites videos on YouTube. The orphan risks you adopt (and which — bizarrely [thanks Fable] — become your pets) are based on my work on orphan risks. The named risks are inspired by my work on risk innovation and the often-overlooked risks that trip up emerging technologies. The emerging technologies themselves are grounded in my work in tech innovation. The panic billboards draw on (and extend in imaginative future-oriented ways) my website techlashed.org, and the moral-panic fires draw on my work on risk perception and engagement. The whole trajectory — and the experiences, decisions, and consequences encountered along the way — reflects my work on human flourishing and navigating complex advanced technology transitions.
In other words, Fable did a pretty good job of capturing my work and thinking in a game that doesn't feel in any way instructional (I hope!).
Of course, it's just a "toy" (as coders would say) and a bit of fun. But underneath the seeming-triviality, it does demonstrate just how capable AI is becoming as something that can help translate experiences, ideas, research, and a lot more into something quite unexpected and serendipitously delightful.
Which ties in rather nicely with my work on the future of being human in an age of increasingly complex technologies — which, of course, is another aspect of my work that Fable was able to capture here 😄
Andrew Maynard — July 2026
HYPERBUBBLE is a small game that knows exactly how small it is. But if you've been playing for even a few minutes, something sneaky has been happening: you've been practicing a real way of thinking about technology and the future. It comes — with plenty of simplification — from the work of Andrew Maynard, a physicist who became a professor of technology transitions at Arizona State University. This page is the tour: where the ideas come from, what the game gets right, where it cheats, and where to go if you want the real thing.
Andrew started out measuring things — really small things. His PhD, at Cambridge in 1992, was in aerosol physics: how to catch and study particles so tiny they float in the air. He then spent years on the kind of unglamorous work that safety actually depends on — figuring out what people were breathing in at work — first for the UK government, then in the US, right as engineered nanoparticles started turning up in labs and products.
And that's where the bigger question found him. Measuring a particle is one thing. But what should we all do when a powerful technology shows up before the science, the rules, and the habits we'd need to handle it well? He spent five years in Washington DC chasing that question for nanotechnology, wrote an influential Nature commentary on handling it safely, and ended up explaining it to Congress more than once.
These days he's at Arizona State University, where his official title is Professor of Advanced Technology Transitions, and where he founded the Future of Being Human initiative. He calls himself an "undisciplinarian" — the problems he cares about don't respect the borders between physics, health, policy, and ethics, so at some point he stopped respecting those borders too.
Here's the standard way to think about risk: multiply how likely something bad is by how much harm it does. That works fine when you can measure the harm. But think about the things you actually worry about — being trusted, being treated with dignity, making your own choices, belonging somewhere, your sense of who you are. None of that fits the math. So it tends to get quietly dropped from the calculations, precisely because it's hard to count.
Andrew's risk innovation framework starts somewhere else: a risk is a threat to something you value — whatever that something is. And living inside that definition are what he named orphan risks: risks nobody owns, because they look too fuzzy, too complicated, or too easy to postpone. No standard tools, no rules, no one responsible. Which is exactly why they have a habit of coming back to bite.
Sound familiar? In the game, the orphans are the wide-eyed blobs. Skip past one and it burrows — then returns with teeth, and the death card tells you what it actually cost you: trust, dignity, autonomy. His real answer isn't to eliminate risk, because you can't. It's a posture: awareness of what might be coming, agility when it arrives, and resilience for when agility isn't enough. The real framework runs on worksheets and hard conversations rather than pets and bites — but the logic is the same, and now it's in your thumbs.
The thread running through all of Andrew's current work goes something like this: societies don't experience powerful technologies as single events. They experience them as transitions — long stretches of time where the rules, the institutions, the jobs, and even people's sense of who they are all get rearranged. The early years of a transition matter enormously, because they set the direction for decades. He watched it happen with nanotechnology. He'd tell you it's happening again right now, much faster and much bigger, with AI.
So what do you do about it? Not the hype, and not the brakes. As he put it in a seminar on AI policy: "We cannot stop the emergence of transformative AI. All we can do is steer it." His version of the famous "pacing problem" is sharper than the usual one, too — it's not just that technology moves faster than regulation. It's that consequences now arrive faster than we can build responses to them.
That's what the PACE ticker and the steadying button are really about. In the game, slowing down to think costs you flourishing, takes deliberate effort to hold, and the world eventually pushes the pace back up. The small lines that appear while you hold it — asking questions first, trying it in a sandbox, rules with a check-back date — are all real things people do to steer new technologies, wearing plain clothes. That's roughly how it works out here, too.
This is where the game simplifies the most, so let's be straight about it. The scribble-fires reward you for starving moral panics of attention — fly past, don't touch, collect a little flourishing. Neat rule. Real life is messier.
Andrew's actual view is that technology panics "are rarely cut and dried." When people get scared of a new technology, it's usually not because they're being silly — it's because they sense a threat to something they genuinely value: their identity, their dignity, their security, their livelihood, their sense of how the world should work. He built Techlashed, an interactive timeline of technology panics stretching from ancient Greece to AI, precisely to understand old worries rather than laugh at them. (Socrates was very worried about writing. He had reasons.)
So when the game teaches you to fly past the fire, keep his caveat in your pocket: look at what the fire is burning around. Concern is usually about something real, and history is full of the damage done by dismissing it.
The Future of Being Human initiative asks a question that sounds simple and isn't: what will it mean to be human in a technologically transformed future? Notice what sits at the center of that question — not what the technology can do, but whether people can flourish. Not just survive the transition. Flourish through it.
His most recent book, written with Jeff Abbott — AI and the Art of Being Human (2025) — takes that question into everyday life, built around four practices: curiosity, intentionality, clarity, and care. And it asks something that's hard to shake once you've heard it: what makes me me, when AI can finish my sentences, copy my style, and predict my choices?
The pink bar in this game is a cartoon of that question. If the cartoon left you curious, the book is where the question gets the room it deserves.
A few honest caveats, so the game doesn't oversell itself:
What a game can do is more modest: let the shape of these trade-offs settle into your hands — the pull of hype, the price of attention, the way ignored things circle back — so that when you meet the serious versions, they feel a little less abstract.