Comment on Interactive Fiction Games Could Make A Comeback With This E-reader Handheld Console
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 1 week ago
My initial reaction was “oh cool”, but I have a feeling most of the games would be something that can just be played on a tablet. I’ll keep an eye out, maybe it’ll be more versatile than the PlayDate.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
That’s like saying you could play PICO-8 games on anything, because it’s true, but the point is to impose limitations, not to make something you could never theoretically do with another device.
Like think about the PICO-8 version of Celeste, which can run inside the main game, but which never would have been made if the PICO-8 didn’t exist, and all the other games made for that platform that wouldn’t exist if that fantasy console had never been invented.
This is similar - by creating a console with very limited resources and I/O, you create a very limited set of expectations, and then it’s easy to make games for it because Skyrim or whatever just isn’t an option, so more people can make those games.
Redkey@programming.dev 1 week ago
You’re kind of arguing against yourself, here. If the point is to impose limitations in order to reduce choice exhaustion and foster creativity, then portable software like PICO-8 can do that just as well as a physical device, and creators will have a much larger potential audience.
I’ve often daydreamed (I’m sure I’m not alone) of making various kinds of electronic entertainment devices with very low specs as a challenge/creativity booster to myself and other creators. But I always come back to the realization that it makes much more sense, in a world where almost everyone has a powerful computing device with plenty of storage and a responsive colour display in their pocket, and constant Internet access, to implement them as software rather than hardware.
A handful of people may be excited enough by the physicality of a device like this that they’ll buy it, but many more people will pass it by. Look at the proliferation of games for software-based formats like PICO-8, Bitsy, Inform, and Twine, compared to development on purely physical “low spec” devices like the PlayDate. Even real vintage systems are starting to become software-based formats; new games developed for them these days will often include an “emulator-friendly” version if they do anything particularly tricky with the original hardware.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
It should be trivial to run the software on other devices because it will be so low-powered, so that problem disappears.
In fact you literally said so yourself. Is that a point in the system’s favour or isn’t it?
If the physical device is also cheap then I think this could easily take off.
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I think you’re forgetting the thing that is also stopping me from doing a lot of random ideas myself. It’s an extra thing to carry.
I often think “man it would be great to use my sp again”, but I can just emulate on delta on my iPhone. It’s the reason I don’t have the PlayDate and why I also don’t have a dumbphone connected to my iPhone even though I’ve thought about it as well. People want to reduce instead of adding more. It’s the reason it still drives me crazy I have 5 remotes for my TV. People just prefer to get a device that can do the most. Hell my parents in their older age are now to the point they don’t care about PCs anymore, they just have a tablet they can add a keyboard to if they want.
All this is not to say this shouldn’t exist. But if it does I really do hope they take full advantage of the setup and do try to innovate and make creative games that would only exist there.