By Alex Wadelton
Look around on any train, tram or bus and you’ll see the same posture everywhere: head down, thumb moving, brain quietly dissolving into the screen. People entranced by their hypno-rectangle, and a grim expression painted upon their face.
The disconnection from the moment is palpable. I wanted to do something to make the journey a smidge more mindful, but had no idea what to do.
Then I listened to a podcast and it all clicked
Last weekend, while cleaning up, I was listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour, a psychedelic mix of humour, religion, Zen, and crazy conspiracy theories. It’s really eclectic.
This episode was Duncan’s “State of the AI Address” and he was talking about the rapid acceleration in AI capabilities, and how because it’s largely unregulated at the moment, people like you and me have access to some pretty incredible tech.
He talked about how he’s made some mind-bending games with OpenAI’s Codex, and because I’ve got lots of ideas, too many ideas some might say, I thought, why don’t I give Codex a go and see what’s possible.
In the past, I’d attempted to build a meditation-style game when Replit came out, and found it basically unusable.
I stopped the podcast, and decided to give Codex a shot at making my idea into reality.
The terrible prompt that somehow worked
This is what I typed, typos included:
Now, reading back, I can barely understand what I was saying, but somehow, through all those typos, Codex understood the tiny little bird-shaped thought inside my head.
What I wanted to build was a meditation game where you follow a moving pixel around the screen and get little prompts every so often to keep you in the moment. That was where it started.
Over a weekend, in between taking my kids to sport, cleaning the house, doing gardening, making lunch, and all the other little jobs that fill up a life, I’d chat intermittently with it, leave it alone for a while, then come back and see what it had made.
I’d type a few instructions, pull out some weeds, check the game, change a colour, add a line, move a thing, soften the tone, nudge it in new directions, give it visual references, suggest language changes, and slowly keep shaping it until it felt more like the thing I had in my head.
Then finally, after all the iterating, changing and improving, BE THE BIRD was alive… alive I tells you!
BE THE BIRD is a tiny meditation game where you follow a little bird around the screen with your finger, slowly tricking your attention into becoming calm.
You can “play” it on computer, but it’s even better on mobile, I reckon.
The Magic Bit
For a creative person, this is the intoxicating bit: the distance between “I have an idea” and “here it is, alive in the world” has almost disappeared.
Things that were once impossible to make are now suddenly possible, not because you have a team, or a budget, or even because you know how to code, but because you have an idea, a point of view, a bit of taste, and the willingness to keep nudging it until it feels right.
You can literally make what matters to you, in next to no time.
I’ve sent BE THE BIRD to a bunch of people and the calmness it is instilling is quite wonderful.
If they had suggestions to improve it, I weighed them up, used the ideas I liked, and left out the ones I didn’t. Because in the end it’s still my vision, my taste, and my preferences in a tiny little package.
It’s a little antidote to brain rot. A little game that doesn’t ask you to win, but simply asks you to stay, to breathe, to notice, and to be the bird.
I play it on the way to work, surrounded by noise and motion and everyone else disappearing into their phones, and for a few minutes I disappear into stillness instead.
I hope you can find a few minutes to Be The Bird too. Play it here on your phone, tablet or desktop.