The site's first game

Two buttons had landed in the same spot, one on top of the other. We could have moved one sixty pixels up. Instead we hid one, and turned it into the site's first game.

1. Two buttons, one seat

At the bottom right of every page lives a small bubble: little Braignak, who takes your questions. He has been there a long time, always in the same place.

Then we added a second button right next to him — a button that changes the vocabulary of the articles. On this site we write with house words: "living map", "guardrail", "wake-up". Those words speak to everyone, but they are not the words of the trade. The button translates, both ways.

Except "right next to him" was in fact exactly the same place. The new button sat on the bubble. Two clickable things stacked: you could no longer reach the one underneath.

2. The obvious fix, and the one we chose

The obvious fix was one line long: move the button a little higher. Five seconds of work, problem solved, nobody ever mentions it again.

We did something else. The button did move up — but above all, it disappeared. It no longer shows up on its own. You have to find the key that makes it exist, and little Braignak is the one holding that key.

Why: a button gets clicked without anyone knowing what it does. A find is remembered. Whoever earns the key has also understood, along the way, that this site speaks two languages: everyone's, and the trade's.

3. The rules of the game

Three sentences, and we are not giving the answer away.

Somewhere on this site, a hidden mode swaps the house words for the words of the trade.
The only clue is already in front of you: some words carry a small dotted underline.
Only one character here holds the key. He sits at the bottom right, he is shaped like a telescope, and he loves being asked questions.

Find the right question, and the button will appear — above him this time, no longer on top of him.

4. A game has to be proven too

A hidden game has one flaw: nobody notices when it breaks. If the key stopped being handed out, no visitor would report it — they would simply assume they had not found it.

So the game has its own test bench: ten checks, run in a real browser, against the live site. They verify both states — before the find and after:

with a fresh browser, the words are underlined and no button appears;
ask the right question, and the key is given and remembered;
ask an ordinary question, and the key is not given;
back on the article, the button exists, it changes the words, and a second click brings them back;
and it no longer covers little Braignak's bubble.

What makes this bench believable: we made it fail on purpose first, against a version where the game does not exist. It went red, six failures out of ten. A check that has never been seen red proves nothing at all.

5. The day the bench lied to itself

Then the bench lied. Not much: one line out of ten. But it lied in the most dangerous direction — the reassuring one.

The bench has to open a fresh browser, with no memory, to check that no button appears before the find. So it asked for a browser with a blank memory, stored in a temporary folder. Except the browser here lives in a bubble: it is not allowed to write in that folder.

It did not protest. It did not warn. It simply reused its usual memory — the one from the previous run, which already held the key. The bench thought it was testing a first-time visitor; it was testing someone who had already won.

The lesson: a tool that disobeys should say so. This one stayed silent. So we added the missing sentence: the bench now checks that the fresh memory was really created, and if it cannot find it, it refuses to conclude instead of reporting green.

6. What is still missing, and we say so

The game only exists in French. The words that switch are French words, and the key is asked for in French. An English-speaking visitor will never see that button. This is not an oversight swept under the rug: it is written here, and it is the next step.

To remember: not every flaw is fixed by moving something. This one asked us to choose what we wanted to offer the visitor — one more button, or a reason to go looking. Published on September 3, 2026.