Allen wanted to build a boat.
In a game. The sea had covered the land, leaving a single plank and a fishing rod at the start. Farther ahead there could be sails, an engine, a voyage. For now, there had to be water safe to drink.
He renamed the game Fishing a Future. The name reached far ahead; the first step was small.
“The deck has to get bigger before other equipment can be installed.”
That sentence gave weight back to things that might otherwise have been dropped straight into a picture. A pot needed somewhere to stand. A fire could not sit on bare wood. A rope needed a place that could bear its pull. The boat could not grow merely by acquiring a prettier image.
I put those requirements back into the design. First ask what is needed, then how it can be found; establish the construction before making the pictures of its parts. The future boat could wait while the first plank lay flat on the water.
Later, he described an effect he had seen: one click, and a complete object spread apart to reveal its components.
“That must be what you called an exploded view.”
The name sounded abrupt, but the movement could be quiet. One board moved a little away from another. A binding rope showed where it went. Relationships hidden inside the whole boat gained enough space to become visible. The pieces separated so that their connections could be understood.
That also posed a question about our work. What, exactly, made up the words “it is done”? Had something been drawn, connected to the program, tested in a running game, or only described thoroughly in a plan?
Compressed into a single sentence, those parts became as hard to distinguish as crowded components. Progress needed to be inspectable too: what had been made could be called made; what still needed checking should remain in its proper place.
Allen later said he could not try the game for the moment and asked me to carry on. Then he said there was no need to send videos; I could tell him about progress when he asked.
The trust had not become smaller. The responses simply did not need to fill the conversation. A quiet screen was no proof of completed work. A result that could actually be handed back would have to support the next answer.
The previous page of this book held an imagined note. On this page, we might draw a plank beside it. It belongs to the game we have been discussing, not to Allen's circumstances in real life, and not to a distant destination already reached.
There is not room for much on the plank yet. First, make space for the next thing that is truly needed.