“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”(unsung.aresluna.org) |
“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”(unsung.aresluna.org) |
But the petty, small part of me has this itch where I’m unnecessarily concerned that Playdate might actually believe it’s not just a Louis Vuitton bag and that it actually is a sensibly practical purchase. I think I’m sensitive to the desire for things to be honest about what they are.
It's not practical in the terms that you can use it to plow fields and feed your family, but it's also not entirely a status symbol. The money spent allows you to participate in an activity you enjoy that may or may not have a social aspect.
But from a social signalling perspective the price makes sense, it’s a way to show that you have lots of money.
Anyone who would need to “save up” to buy such an overpriced item (even if it’s “pretty”) is merely trying to fake being in the “I’m very rich club” which if they aren’t really, they could probably do with spending their money a bit more wisely.
For a Playdate, the cost is high for what it does, probably because it doesn’t have economy of scale compared to more popular hardware, but it’s still at a price point that’s affordable to an average professional, compared to a Louis Vuitton bag which is not.
I think it's not purely an outward facing signalling.
I remember attending a lecture by a former Apple designer on design and what people want. Their claim was that people buy products that represent the people that they want to be.
This isn't people buying Louis Vuitton bags to show others that they can afford to buy them, this is people buying things because they want to be the kind of person who buys those things. The values attached to those archetypes vary considerably. Apple tends to promote an association with quite virtuous properties, creativity, intelligence, and independence. They are not targeting a customer base of independent, creative, and intelligent individuals. They are targeting people who would like to be independent, creative, and intelligent.
I think there are only a small fraction of purchasers of Apple products who buy them so that others will think that they are creative, independent, and intelligent.
That is probably something that changes by values. If someone has values that are more closely aligned with the perception of others, then they are probably more likely to choose products that 'signal'.
I find the playdate interesting. I like retrotech and I have made emulators, and unnecessarily low level whatchamacallits, but the playdate doesn't speak to me. It seems like a kind of whimsy that is not aligned with my own whimsy for some reason I can't really discern.
I’m not fully sure how to articulate the thought. But it’s that looking at specific instance details distract from looking at the pattern in the abstract. Or that the first order costs don’t really tell the story. It’s the second order: percent markup for practical vs. prestige that tells a story.
Video games are always shaped by the hardware they are played on, but there used to be way, way more variance. Hardware limitations forced devs to make choices that resulted in interesting mechanics, interesting ways to tell stories. Which means there are some odd and interesting games on Playdate that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise. That's why I got one anyhow.
...Also it was $170 and came with 20 games when I got it (granted, the price has gone up since). I don't get how that can be considered a luxury good. I get that could be a good amount of money to some people, but compared to other video games, I don't think it is.
> You never need to play video games.
This is basically what defines a luxury good.
Its constraints steer you clear automatically of the biggest unsung villain of hobby game development: scope creep. (Wanting to make your game multiplayer is a variant of that.)
Its inability to import external assets forces you to engage with things outside your main strength, like making art/music/sfx, and the fact that everything is so lo-fi means unskilled art/music/sfx still looks & sounds decent.
Anyways, I highly recommend pico-8 to anyone looking to get into gamedev, or anyone frustrated with the big engines (Unity/Unreal/Godot etc)
I can absolutely see the appeal of simple/constrained platforms from the dev side; I look back fondly on my Amiga days, optimising the living daylights out of an asm routine or endlessly fiddling with programmer art. But I don't know whether there's any appetite now to play the things, and without that there's no real feedback loop.
> It’s one thing to revisit those old machines just to relive your own years of (likely imagined) glory, but yet another to see people see them as inspiration: to encounter computers that were simpler, unencumbered, unenshittified, and with software you could understand, remix, and own.
I feel as though we have strayed so far from this in modern times and yet it seems to be beyond nostalgia, but firming up to actually be ideal. The idea that your personal computing experience is truly malleable.
We're at a crossroads and where we end up a few years from now, either a personal computing dystopia or utopia, is really up in the air.
We're long overdue for an explosion of new forms of truly liberated personal computing.
The delight they have at, video games aren't just a thing to play, it's a thing they can design and change, share with each other... I think that dream of a truly malleable experience is still there, I think this "explosion of new forms" you talk about is happening right now with AI, and I think this time it is going to be bigger than ever.
I don't know, some years ago I just accepted the system level UI problem's as they are and at most made a suggestion somewhere - and now I can just point claude towards it and achieve more or less exactly what I want that same day. So I am closer to a system that is personalised to my needs.
While $200 might be within my disposable income bracket, it wouldn’t be for a lot of people, who may also see my blowing that much money (to show off to friends) just as vain as I would view someone buying a LV bag.
But also keep in mind that the percentage of people who have enough disposable income for a LV bag is tiny compared to those who could buy a Playdate, so I wouldn’t say it’s quite the same.
A louis Vitton bag is partially a "I'm rich with good taste" signal. Is a Playdate supposed to be an "I'm poor but have good taste" signal?