3 weird things about Metamorphabet

I’m about a year late to Metamorphabet, an interactive alphabet out for iPhone and iPad. It’s an Apple Design Award Winner and has gotten plenty of great coverage. I particularly recommend this piece from Wired.

All the write-ups use words like weird, surreal, creepy, etc. to describe Metamorphabet. And I think they’re right. But I want to dig a little deeper.

What is it that gives Metamorphabet these qualities? Why does it feel so different from other apps?

Metamorphabet is quiet

Quiet in every sense: quiet in colors, quiet in motion, quiet in sound. Metamorphabet can get very loud and frenzied, but only in short spurts. In its default state Metamorphabet is still.

This might not sound like much but open up another app. I just opened up Twitter. A video ad started running on its own. More tweets were tweeted and a “See new Tweets” bubble appeared at the top of my feed. Twitter seeks to create the understanding that it is always on, always working in the background.

In a side project, I’m learning how to handle data. To do this the docs say to attach a “listener.” The name of the method is “observe.” Apps are always listening, observing. I don’t get this sense with Metamorphabet. Metamorphabet feels like a golem. It comes alive at your touch, it rests when you’re gone.

The video ad on Twitter ends and Twitter autoplays another video ad.

Metamorphabet responds variably

This is clumsily worded. What I mean is: almost every thing in Metamorphabet responds to your touch. But what those things do in response is difficult to predict. The result is surprise.

Surprise is often used as a pejorative in applications. When I file a bug, one of the things I do is write out the expected behavior and the actual behavior. The delta is surprise.

I wonder: if you were trying to design a thing to have the biggest delta between the expected and actual behavior, how would you do it?

Those Rube Goldberg machines come to mind. Nudge a domino and you trigger a whole chain of events outside of your control. But you can probably figure out what to expect from a Rube Goldberg machine by looking at it for a while.

I am on “J.” Two hands juggle balls. I tap one of the balls and the hands drop it. They pick it up again. Now I tap the hands. They disappear and the balls float in space. I tap one of the balls. It turns into a jellyfish and starts swimming around. I drag the jellyfish and it moves in the direction I drag it, with some resistance.

I love the resistance in Metamorphabet. Everything complies, with some misgivings.

Metamorphabet is sufficiently rich

More weird phrasing. Metamorphabet is a kind of puzzle. To progress through “level M”, you need to discover every word that starts with that letter: March, Monster, Mouth.

Players engage with a typical puzzle on good faith that every piece exists for some reason. A jigsaw puzzle that contains extra pieces is considered dishonest. In Myst, I might not know what to do with this ship just yet, but I know that it will be relevant later.

Because Metamorphabet is such an easy puzzle, it has the luxury of leaving all sorts of loose odds and ends. Being a puzzle isn’t even its primary concern. I pry open the knight’s helmet to see an eye peeking out at me. I let go of the helmet and it clanks shut. This does not advance the puzzle in any way.

Metamorphabet is so packed with interactions like this that I just sort of assume there are an innumerable amount. It is sufficiently rich. I don’t know what to call this design pattern but I see it in cities and texts and sometimes games. It’s when something is so dense, so packed with stuff, that it feels infinitely large. The notion of 100% completion feels not just very difficult to achieve, but mathematically impossible.