Leveling Game

Witnessing and playing a part in dysfunction within families, within friend groups, within organizations (though mostly recognized in retrospect). I’ve often found myself wondering why things break. Why systems, despite good intentions, seem to fray at the edges or collapse altogether. When I was a boy, I was fascinated by plane crashes. Not out of morbid curiosity, but because I couldn’t understand how something so massive, so engineered, could fall apart. It usually started small: a faulty part, a missed step, a not so subtle shift in wind. Failure rarely came all at once; it accumulated quietly, then suddenly.

That curiosity never left. Over time, I began to notice that the same dynamics exist in creative and organizational systems. The same small misalignments. The same slow unraveling. But also when it works, the same quiet integrity. In the last memo, we explored play as a medium for agency: a way to experiment, move, and improvise. But play alone can’t hold everything. To sustain and scale creativity, we need structure to protect and extend freedom. That’s where composability enters. It’s the counterpart to improvisation: a quiet architecture that lets small parts add up to something resilient.

Composability isn’t just a technical concept. It’s a philosophy of how we build things that last and evolve. It asks: how do we design with the expectation of change, without letting that change destabilize the whole? How do we embed adaptation into the bones of a system?

If games are artful manipulations of agency, then composability is the grammar of that art form. A design language for configuring meaningful choice, connection, and expression.

Law of Composability

The central law of composability is simple but profound: nothing is new, only recombined. This principle dismantles the illusion of originality and replaces it with a deeper understanding of transformation. Composability shifts the creative act from invention to arrangement, from origin to orchestration.

In modular thinking, systems, stories, tools (even identities) are made of repeatable parts. The power lies not in the uniqueness of the parts themselves, but in the endless ways they can be configured. A Lego brick, a musical note, a UI component. All are tokens of potential. Meaning is not embedded within the module; it emerges from the composition.

This reframes the designer or thinker as a curator of relationships. Someone who creates not by generating newness from scratch but by arranging existing elements into resonant formations. It is both liberating and humbling: liberating because you are never without material, humbling because meaning is never fully in your control. It emerges between the parts, between the players, in the space of exchange.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ offers a striking metaphor here. In one scene, the protagonist says something unexpected to a non-playable character (NPC), and the NPC glitches unable to respond. This reveals a fundamental truth about many systems we inhabit: even those that feel dynamic and immersive often operate within preconfigured constraints. The player’s agency is shaped by the system’s limits, and stepping outside the “expected script” disrupts the illusion of openness.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen explores this concept in Games: Agency as Art, where he argues that games are designed experiences of agency, more than entertainment alone. A game shapes what kinds of choices are available, what skills are valued, and how success is defined. In this sense, games are not just rule sets but intentional constraints that sculpt the player’s sense of freedom and engagement. (s/o to Rob C. for this keystone example)

AI and the Magnetism of Modular Meaning

AI, as we know it today, is arguably the most advanced expression of composability. These models are not trained to understand in the human sense. They’re trained to remix. Fed on fragments of our culture, they synthesize, interpolate, and reassemble meaning in ways that often feel uncanny, provocative, or profound.

But AI doesn’t merely assemble parts; it magnetizes them. A prompt activates a swarm of associations. It draws together aesthetics, symbols, styles, and tones with a kind of emotional logic. Like a well-curated collage, the outputs reveal tensions, resonances, and unexpected harmonies between disparate modules of meaning.

A film like Everything Everywhere All at Once expands the idea of composability to a cosmic scale, showing what happens when it becomes overwhelming. Evelyn, exposed to countless versions of herself, becomes paralyzed by possibility. The modularity that promises freedom instead fractures her sense of identity. We may experience a similar fragmentation on a local scale. The many roles and spaces we inhabit, shifting between them based on context or circumstance, can mirror Evelyn’s disorientation. What restores coherence isn’t better logic or structure, but emotional magnetism: love, humor, tenderness. Even in the modular chaos of our lives, it’s emotional connection that gives form its meaning.

Tokens, Power, and the Performance of Systems

Every modular system has its atomic units, its tokens. In software, a token might be a function or a UI component. In crypto, it’s a unit of value or governance. In organizations, it’s often behavior, language, or title. But tokens aren’t just utilitarian; they’re symbolic. They carry meaning, status, and consequence.

Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You takes this to a surreal extreme. Cassius Green adopts a “white voice” to succeed. A literal tokenized identity. Advancement requires adopting new modules of performance, each pulling him further from his core self. Eventually, even labor becomes absurdly composable: WorryFree’s genetically modified workers are modular bodies optimized for efficiency and control. The message is sharp, when composability is stripped of emotional logic and human context, it becomes a mechanism of total abstraction.

This theme, while wildly surreal, is eerily personal. Early in my career, I noticed that in certain rooms, my natural voice deep, full, and shaped by my identity as a Black man was either overlooked or misread as aggressive. It wasn’t just what I said, but how I sounded that determined whether I was heard. So I adjusted. I consciously removed the bass from my voice. And strangely, it worked. My ideas began to gain traction. My career moved forward. More responsibility, more recognition, a couple of promotions. It’s hard to say whether the shift brought a deeper intention to how I used my voice, or simply made me more palatable. What’s clear is that it came at a cost. The adjustment wasn’t just tactical it was symbolic. A part of me had been modularly swapped out to gain System Compatibility. And while that move earned me success, it eventually left me questioning what parts of myself I had muted to remain legible within the system. Which aspects of ourselves do we amplify or suppress depending on the room? This is the invisible calculus many of us face: the trade-off between coherence and compromise in systems that reward performative adaptation over authentic presence.

Performative systems often reward legibility over authenticity. This reveals a key tension: the freedom to compose versus the pressure to conform. True composability should expand agency, instead of reducing it to a performance.

We see this play out in design systems. Google’s Material Design introduced tokens for everything, color, elevation, motion. Creating a shared language that could scale across devices and teams. Its clarity and consistency brought cohesion across Android’s ecosystem. But as adoption grew, so did uniformity. In most cases, designers began performing the system instead of extending it. Predictability became the expression of least resistance.

Spotify’s “Squad” model shows how this plays out organizationally. Squads were designed as modular teams. Encouraging autonomy and speed, allowing squads to own specific product areas. But without shared alignment aka P0s, autonomy turned into drift. What looked elegant on paper became fragmented in practice. Performance, once again, took the place of participation.

Lessons across these examples are clear: modularity doesn’t ensure vitality. What matters is how a system handles difference. Does it absorb it? Ignore it? Or make space for it to reshape the whole?

Games Within a Game

Zooming out, composable systems are rarely experienced in a singular, linear way. People live inside layers of nested games. The official rules, the unspoken incentives, the shadow systems of power. Composability, here, becomes a means of survival. People learn to remix roles, reframe expectations, and adapt behaviors. Navigation becomes an art form. This is where tokens become moves. Identity becomes fluid. Strategy replaces rigidity. In this way, composability describes how people live inside systems, not just the systems themselves.

Fincher’s The Game explores composability from within. The protagonist, Nicholas Van Orton, is thrust into a simulation that deconstructs his identity and control. The narrative operates like a composable engine: events are structured like modular set pieces, each designed to provoke a specific emotional or psychological response. Nothing is random, yet nothing is explained. Tokens of meaning appear and disappear. Clues, characters, and props reconfigured to reshape his understanding of reality. The game’s goal isn’t victory, it’s identity reconstruction. Agency is revealed not through control, but through surrender to the system’s logic. It’s a transformation not unlike Megatron physically becoming Galvatron c/o Unicron. A complete reconstitution of the self through an overwhelming external system. Here, composability shapes inner change.

Transition to Interdependence

Composability invites endless iteration at the risk of nausea. But at a certain point, the proliferation of parts demands coherence. The question becomes what fits and what belongs together?

Without relationship, modularity becomes fragmentation. Without shared values, recombination leads to incoherence. The next step in this evolution is interdependence: the design of systems that not only adapt but align. That don’t just scale, but sustain.

In Ways of Being, James Bridle explores intelligence as an emergent, relational phenomenon, something that arises in networks of connection between organisms, environments, and systems rather than residing in discrete minds or modules. This view aligns with the spirit of interdependence. It suggests that the future of composability is not just more efficient recombination, but deeper attunement. Designing systems that recognize and respond to the intelligence of everything they touch. From mycelial networks to algorithmic cultures, the next horizon of composability is not what we build, but how we relate.

For my final film reference, I’ll tap Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which offers a poetic expression of this idea. In the film’s climax, Cooper enters the tesseract. A multidimensional space where every moment of his daughter Murph’s childhood bedroom exists simultaneously. Despite having infinite access to time and data, what ultimately allows him to act meaningfully within the system isn’t logic. It’s love. Emotion becomes the organizing principle. The signal that cuts through complexity. The structuring force that binds time, meaning, and action.

If composability is the grammar of possibility, then interdependence is the poetry of meaning. We move from dynamic potential to resonant coherence, from pieces that fit, to patterns that hold.

Long Live the Game.