Websites Are About to Become Video Games

There is a product designer named Tom Johnson who built his portfolio as a playable world. You control a character — him — and you walk through pixel-art offices, sit down at desks, listen to ambient sound design, click on projects, and hear his voice attached to each one. The panel on the side gives you a clean, conventional portfolio if you want it. But most people do not want it. They explore the world instead. I found myself doing the same thing, and I could not stop thinking about why.

Websites are about to become video games. Not metaphorically. Not as a gimmick. As the dominant model for how serious brands present themselves online — and the tools to build them are already here, today, running on Claude and Three.js and a couple of days of focused work. I broke this down on camera and showed my own prototype in progress — the full video is below.

Why the Standard Website Is Already Losing the Attention War

Here is the problem every web designer, developer, and one-person agency is staring at right now. You build a clean, well-structured website for a client. Nice typography, clear navigation, solid copy. It looks professional. And it does almost nothing. The average visitor bounces in under thirty seconds. They scroll half the page, see a hero section that looks like every other hero section in the niche, and they leave. You did the work. You charged the rate. And the site sits there, inert, losing.

The instinct for most builders has been to optimize the thing that already exists. Faster load times. Better headlines. Stronger calls to action. A/B tests on button colours. These are real improvements and they matter at the margins. But they are all trying to fix a fundamentally passive medium. A conventional website asks the visitor to read. And reading, in 2026, is asking a lot from someone whose phone is engineered by a team of a thousand behavioural scientists to keep them scrolling somewhere else.

The other failed solution has been video backgrounds and flashy animations — the kind of immersive funnel Luke himself built a couple of years ago and never launched, because the video payload made it so heavy it was unusable. The ambition was right. The tools were not there yet. So the project sat in a folder and the world got a static site instead.

That calculation has now flipped.

What Is Dopamine Capitalism and Why Should You Care?

Before we get to the tools, you need to understand the underlying mechanism. Because if you build an immersive website without understanding this, you will produce something beautiful that still does not work.

Scientists in the mid-twentieth century built something called a Skinner box. They put a mouse inside, gave it a button, and rewarded it with food each time it pressed. The mouse learned the rule, ate until it was full, and stopped pressing. Predictable reward produces predictable, finite behaviour. Then they changed the experiment. Same box, same button. But now the food was variable — sometimes nothing, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, in no pattern the mouse could detect. The mouse went into overdrive. It spammed the button continuously and showed signs of addiction. The unpredictable, intermittent reward was not just more motivating than the predictable one. It was incomparably more motivating.

What you might recognise in that story is Instagram. Facebook. YouTube. The slot machine in Las Vegas. Every major attention platform on earth has encoded Skinner's discovery into its product at scale, and the result is apps that a billion people cannot put down. Dopamine, it turns out, is not a reward chemical. It is a motivation chemical — the thing your brain releases in pursuit of a reward, not upon receiving it. Uncertainty is the lever. The slot machine is the mechanism.

For years, this kind of engineered experience was only available to companies with enormous budgets and specialist teams — the Facebooks and Apples of the world. Building genuinely sticky digital experiences required Blender, Unreal Engine, teams of developers, and money that a freelancer or one-person agency could not touch. The skill gap alone was prohibitive. The cost on top of it was impossible.

That is the gap that is closing right now, fast.

The Convergence That Changes Everything for Builders

Tom Johnson's portfolio was not built by a studio. It was not built with Unreal Engine. When I asked his embedded AI assistant how he actually made it, the answer was Three.js — and every pixel coded with Claude or ChatGPT. A single designer. Real-time, interactive, spatially navigable. Fast enough to load without friction. Built from imagination and the AI models that are available to anyone reading this today.

Around the same time, someone else went viral by building what looked like a warehouse management strategy game — except the warehouse was a real business, and the game was the interface. It looked like a demo. It is a glimpse of a direction.

What we are watching is a convergence of two things that have always made intuitive sense together but were kept apart by technical cost: gaming philosophy and web design. Gaming has spent decades learning how to make people stick. Variable rewards. Exploration. Discovery. A sense that the next room might contain something unexpected. These are not tricks. They are deeply human responses to novelty and agency. And the web, until very recently, had no affordable way to deploy them at the level of an individual creator or small agency.

With the current generation of AI coding tools — Claude, the models behind them, the rapid iteration they enable — that barrier is gone. Not reduced. Gone. The constraint is no longer technical skill or budget. The constraint is imagination. That is a genuinely new sentence to be able to write about web design.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

After spending time in Tom's world, I mocked up a version for BraveBrand on paper — literally sketched out where the buildings should sit — and then briefed an AI to build it. A couple of days of work produced a playable BraveBrand world: a little character you control, a cinema where you can browse content, case study buildings for clients, a Digital Home open house, individual buildings for each of our agents, an HQ where you can see who works here and what we do. Paul Counsel — our mentor — lives on a small island in the middle of a lake.

Is it ready to go live? No. I am honest about that. There are dozens of micro-interactions that Tom has nailed in his build that take real craft to execute well, and the BraveBrand version needs a lot more work before it earns its place in front of paying clients. But the structure underneath it is already something useful: it is a sales funnel displayed as a strategy game. Visitors enter on one side of the world. They walk through different environments at their own pace, choosing what to explore. The cinema is content. The case study buildings are social proof. The agent buildings explain the offer. The HQ tells the origin story. Every conventional sales funnel element is there — just dressed as a place you choose to visit rather than a page you are pushed down.

That distinction matters more than it might sound. A funnel you are pushed through creates resistance. A world you choose to explore creates curiosity. The dopamine loop activates not because you engineered it cynically, but because the environment itself produces the conditions for it — novel rooms, unpredictable discoveries, the feeling that the next click might show you something worth seeing.

This is what an AI-driven web design workflow starts to unlock when you stop using it to produce faster versions of the same thing and start using it to produce things that were previously impossible.

Why This Is an Ownership Story, Not Just a Design Story

Here is where the Own Your Home argument lands. Because websites are about to become video games is not just an observation about aesthetics or user experience. It is an argument about competitive moats.

If your client's website looks like everyone else's website — same template, same hero, same CTA button — the only differentiator left is price. And price, in a market where AI has compressed the cost of producing competent output, is a race you cannot win. The bottom has evaporated. A Ramp study from February 2026 found that freelance marketplace spend fell from 0.66% of company budgets in 2022 to 0.14% by 2025, while AI model spend rose from zero to 2.85% in the same period. That money did not move to a cheaper freelancer. It moved to a subscription. The middle of the market is gone.

What survived — and grew — is the premium end. Median small-business website projects rose to $5,000–$10,000 from $2,000–$5,000 five years ago. The market is not paying less for great work. It is paying more. But great work now has to mean something a client genuinely cannot get from a $20-a-month AI tool on their own. A gamified, interactive world they own outright, built on open infrastructure, that behaves like a living sales system and not a digital brochure — that is a $10,000 conversation. A five-page Squarespace site is not.

This connects directly to the Sovereignty Ladder: renting attention from an algorithm is a liability that resets every time you stop posting. A Digital Home — a place people actually come to, return to, explore on their own terms — is an asset. An immersive world that deploys dopamine mechanics and gives visitors a reason to stay, come back, and bring someone else is the furthest point on that ladder. It is the homeowner's position, not the tenant's.

The builders who will charge premium rates in the next two years are not the ones who ship faster. They are the ones who can build experiences that no template can replicate and no $20-a-month tool can produce. The gamified Digital Home is that experience. Your AI website does not have to look like AI — and it definitely does not have to look like a website.

What Builders Should Be Doing Right Now

The practical question is not whether websites are about to become video games. They already are, for the builders paying attention. The question is what you do with that before the window closes.

The first move is to stop optimising existing formats and start experimenting with new ones. Tom Johnson did not improve a portfolio template. He threw the template away and asked what the experience should feel like. That is the brief that produces something worth a premium rate. Sketch the world on paper before you open a code editor — the spatial logic of what goes where, what the visitor discovers first, what is tucked around a corner.

The second move is to understand the dopamine mechanics before you apply them. Variable reward works because it creates genuine uncertainty. That means the exploration has to surface real surprises — a piece of content the visitor did not expect, a case study that lands in a context they chose to enter, a moment of discovery they will remember. Immersive for its own sake produces novelty that wears off in ninety seconds. Immersive with intent produces the kind of sticky experience that gaming has delivered for decades.

The third move is to build the infrastructure underneath it correctly. An immersive experience that lives on a rented platform is still a rented experience. The point of the Digital Home is that you own the ground it sits on — the code, the data, the contacts, the content. An agency that builds a gamified world on GoHighLevel or Squarespace has handed the client a beautiful house on land they do not own. That is a liability that will detonate eventually, usually at the worst possible time. The owned audience strategy applies here exactly as it does to email lists and content libraries.

The tools exist. The examples are live and replicable. The market is moving toward premium and away from commodity. The only thing left is whether you choose to lead that shift or watch someone else do it.

Websites are about to become video games. The builders who get there first will own that category. The ones who wait will be optimising templates for clients who no longer see the point.

If you want to watch the full build walkthrough — the BraveBrand world, the Tom Johnson breakdown, and the dopamine mechanics explained in real time — the video is at youtube.com/watch?v=l-YuZb9SRB4.

Ready to Build Something Worth Owning?

If this has you thinking about what your Digital Home could actually look like — not a template, a world — the BraveBrand community is where that conversation lives. We are working through exactly this: how to build experiences that clients pay premium rates for, that you own outright, and that keep working when you step away.

Join the BraveBrand community on Skool — it is free to start, and this is the room where the next generation of one-person agencies is being built.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean that websites are about to become video games?

The claim is that interactive, spatially navigable, game-like web experiences are moving from experimental novelty to a viable standard for serious brands. AI coding tools like Claude have made it possible for a single developer or designer to build these experiences in days rather than months, at a fraction of what it would have cost with Blender or Unreal Engine two years ago.

Who is Tom Johnson and why does his portfolio matter?

Tom Johnson is a product designer who built his online portfolio as a fully playable pixel-art world — visitors control a character, walk through offices, and discover his projects spatially. The whole thing runs on Three.js, coded with Claude and ChatGPT. It matters because it is the first widely shared proof that this kind of experience is achievable by an individual without a studio behind them.

What is the Skinner box and how does it apply to web design?

The Skinner box was a psychology experiment demonstrating that variable, unpredictable rewards drive far more repeated behaviour than consistent ones — the mouse that could not predict its food pressed the button compulsively. Web design that deploys the same principle — novel rooms, unexpected discoveries, unpredictable content — creates the same stickiness that gaming and social platforms have used for years to hold attention.

Is this actually relevant if I build websites for small businesses, not tech companies?

Yes, and more immediately than it might seem. The market data shows that median small-business website projects have risen to $5,000–$10,000, while the commodity middle has collapsed. A gamified, interactive Digital Home is the premium deliverable that justifies those rates and cannot be replicated by a client using a $20-a-month AI tool themselves. Websites are about to become video games at every level of the market, not just at the enterprise end.

How long does it actually take to build something like this?

The BraveBrand prototype — a fully navigable world with a cinema, case study buildings, agent offices, and an HQ — took a couple of days of focused work using AI coding tools. Tom Johnson's more polished version took longer, because the micro-interactions that make it feel genuinely crafted require real attention. The raw structure is fast; the craft layer on top of it is where the premium rate lives.

Does this change the ownership argument for Digital Homes?

It strengthens it. Websites are about to become video games built on open infrastructure that you and your client own outright — or they become experiences built on rented platforms that can lock out your data and change their pricing at any time. The gamified layer is only an asset if the ground underneath it is owned. Building on GoHighLevel or Squarespace and then adding immersive experiences on top is still tenancy, not ownership.