The Button Effect is an elegant exploration of cause and effect in game design

Dayten Rose, 8 December 2025

A video game character brought to planet Earth may be surprised by the inferiority of the button. Doors are not opened by glowing buttons elevated on plinths, but instead have been reduced to little rubber or plastic things stuck in tight rows on coffee machines, dishwashers, and the backs of televisions. Dials, switches, and touchscreens are just as common, further demoting the button's humble importance. Discounting the small squadrons of buttons arranged on keyboards and telephones, the real-world button is almost a rarity.

The Button Effect is the cause of my most recent fixation, as well as the strange looks I’ve received while hard-staring over cafe counters to count the number of buttons. This minimalist puzzler is a small homily on the button, “little monuments to your influence on reality.” The demo I played was more a dissection than a lesson, directing my attention but delivering no searing revelations. I’m charmed, though, by its prolonged attention to something so easily forgotten—charmed enough to pick up where it leaves off and push its inquiry further.

The Button Effect strips away the artifice of puzzle games, contextualizing its puzzles as works in a museum exhibit titled “The Button Effect: Pressing Matters.” It strives for absolute aesthetic efficiency: It’s a game where you press buttons, and it is about pressing buttons. That’s not to say the puzzle mechanics aren’t complex (and at times complicated), only that there’s no separation between the game’s themes and the activities you perform.

Certain puzzles are narrated by a childlike voice, which states this theme more clearly:  “All change, at any scale, is significant.” These bits of poetry were rarer than I’d like, and despite making the all-too-common claim that every detail serves some narrative purpose, the puzzles rarely spoke for themselves. Where the experiment succeeds is in its empty space, its stripping away.

It’s a dirty trick to use the context of a museum to induce players to think more deeply than they would otherwise, but it’s an effective one. I stood in front of a diorama of the exhibit itself for a long time, crouching to peek through the windows as I would in a real museum, thinking about how this must be the same view a level designer would see when making a game. Specifically, I thought about Call of Duty.

A typical Call of Duty campaign consists of levels as linear as a museum exhibit. The reticle is a visual metaphor for attention. The attention wanders across space (“the environment”) until it finds an enemy soldier (“the object”). To win the game, a player must interact (euphemism) with enough objectives to exhaust the available environment. What Call of Duty conceals with layers of camo and carbon fibre, and what The Button Effect’s exhibit reveals, is the nature of this interaction. A button is pressed. The world responds.

Video games are a medium about pushing buttons. This is true in the contrived way that I’ve just described, but also in a very literal way. The “game” of “video game” has nothing to do with whatever’s happening on the screen, and everything to do with the physical movement of the player’s body through space. We press buttons. Modern controllers are designed to be compact, limiting the range of necessary movements, but something like JS Joust or Wii Sports reminds us of the physicality of games.

Design researcher Don Norman developed the “action cycle” as a way of describing our interaction with objects in the physical world: we formulate a goal; we mentally organize a plan that will allow us to reach that goal, and we enact it; the world changes in response to our action; we witness the change and interpret whether or not our goal has been achieved. If so, we move on to the next goal. If not, then we correct our plan. Either we open the jam jar and proceed to make a sandwich, or else we can’t figure out how to get the thing open.

But objects in the world are not uniformly well-designed. My microwave has two buttons. One of them is clearly defined, and in its center is a divot about the size of my fingertip. When I press my finger into the finger-shaped divot, the button resists to a point, and then the door to the microwaves springs open. I can feel the effect of the button on the microwave door. I can imagine a little catch or spring that holds the door closed. Whether or not that’s what’s actually happening, my conceptual model will work until I find some reason to rewrite it.

The other button is a gray icon on the surface of the microwave, indistinguishable as a button except by color, that says the word “POTATO.” When I press the POTATO button, the clock display changes to a number “1.” Nothing I press seems to influence this display. When I press “start,” a timer starts for six minutes and 30 seconds.

Practically speaking, I know how one of these buttons works, even though I don’t really know how it works. The other is a mystery to me. In Call of Duty, I have no idea what deep machinery allows my physical movements to translate into success within the game. But the images on the screen, first-person perspective, and flashes of tutorial text help me build a conceptual model of what my button pushes will accomplish. I don’t know how video games work, but I know how Call of Duty works.

Conceptual models are most visible in games where they fail. Anyone who plays games has had the experience of knowing what real-world action they would like to perform, but being unable to figure out which input will get them there.  No sane conceptual model would plan for such infamous puzzles as, say, using maple syrup to adhere cat fur to Gabriel Knight’s upper lip. See also essayist Razbuten’s illuminating “Gaming for a Non-Gamer” series, showing how game design conventions often take our pre-existing conceptual models for granted.

And so we return to the button. We might conceptualize a video game button as operating like its real-world counterpart, but they differ in significant, practical ways. Tossing a crate at one of the pedestal buttons in Portal won’t press it. Only facing the button and clicking the corresponding “interact” button on the controller will count as pressing the button.

Whole puzzle game levels are built around this limitation. The challenge in these levels is, in fact, to get close enough to the button to successfully interact with it. But nothing about the video game button requires proximity. As Don Norman notes about touchscreen displays, you can’t press it with your elbows if your arms are full.

One of the bolder design choices revealed early in The Button Effect is that buttons can be pressed at any distance. Though this complicates the game’s narrative layer, it also peels back the most prominent error in our conceptual model about video buttons—that is, their physicality. We’re left with the barest possible conceptual model for the video game button: they cause something to happen somewhere. The button represents cause and effect.

The Button Effect hitches its central metaphor (and its title) to the butterfly effect, restating that small causes can have large effects over time. If it’s not too audacious, I think the game misdiagnoses its own core idea. Its effects are immediate and perfectly proportional to their causes. One flap of its butterfly’s wings doesn’t cause a tornado in Texas; thousands of wingbeats cause thousands of tiny gusts. There are many buttons.

What The Button Effect displays, in articulate sprawling diagrams like Evelyn tables, is the construction of a conceptual model through repeated prodding. Its exhibits lay bare the process by which we understand our world, the game’s world, any world. We act, we watch what happens, and then we act again. We plan, we learn, we make new plans.

Puzzle games especially focus on the process of understanding. Where other genres would prefer that the player acquire an accurate conceptual model as quickly as possible so that they can move on to the repeated execution of micro-goals, the puzzle game withholds complete understanding. It presents the player with simple rules, then enumerates their exceptions.

The butterfly effect is one of the oldest fantasies of interactive fiction. Our actions in the real world are messy, their impacts unclear, and this is mirrored by narrative games in which events may diverge widely with the mere press of—what else—a button. But when I reflect on my own life, I struggle to find more than a handful of drastic, invisibly important choices. They aren’t the main way we navigate the world.

Instead, we feel it out, poking and testing what’s in front of us, and in doing so, we learn what’s possible. We push thousands of buttons and influence reality in thousands of little ways. Puzzle games, by simplifying the realities of cause and effect, are inadequate to the task of “teaching” us how to be in the world. But they do engage the parts of our brains that thrive on action, observation, evaluation and reevaluation. They keep us curious.