“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy” | Hacker News Reader

“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”

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67 pointszdw27 comments

Playdate feels like a Louis Vuitton bag in that you buy it not because you need a bag but because you want a fancy luxury good that feels good for you to own. I’m not criticizing it, though. I celebrate that we have options. When I got my kid a Scratch + JS game dev handheld I found a dozen options with varying pros and cons.

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.

There's a big difference in level of Veblen between a silly $200 gadget and a $3k handbag.

To whom?

well the signals are completely reversed. A playdate is $230. a PS5 is what? $600 dollars now? Playdate games range from $5-20 (and most will usually fall around $10), your typical console game will be $30-80+, before including expansion packs.

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?

Honestly I'm reading a lot more signal from your perspective that a poor person is someone who has to settle for "only" spending a couple hundred dollars on a console.

The same could be said for an Apple laptop.

From a purely utilitarian point of view, the price of a Louis Vuitton bag is unjustifiable.

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.

But isn’t the scale not really relevant? There’s entire classes of luxury that are exactly the same thing to people who can own an LV bag. Saving up to buy a faberge helicopter or whatever it is.

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.

It’s a fair point to raise and also occurred to me shortly after writing my comment.

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.

>But from a social signalling perspective the price makes sense, it’s a way to show that you have lots of money.

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 see the Playdate as further from a Louis Vuitton bag and closer to hockey gear you might buy to partake in an amateur adult league.

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.

I think the makers of the Playdate have always been pretty clear about what the console is about. And I'm not sure you could ever consider a video game console a "practical" purchase. You never need to play video games.

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.

> I don't get how that can be considered a luxury good.

> You never need to play video games.

This is basically what defines a luxury good.

I mean, sure, but you seemed to be differentiating the Playdate from other video game hardware. Maybe I misunderstood.

It would be like if there was a console 1/5th the price of a PS5 for approximately the same features.

>you want a fancy luxury good that feels good for you to own

I think teenage engineer products would fit more. Did you take a look at the price of their "field recorder". Jesus, but can't deny it's so cool.

It's a spectrum.

Walmart makes a coffee mug for like $2. Louis Vuitton will sell you one for $385. But there's an entire class of coffee mugs in the middle, where you're paying more than it "should" cost, but less than you would for status signaling.

An example is this mug [1]. It's $18, so it's not even close to being a status symbol. It's also a little nicer than a Walmart mug. But I'd be hard-pressed to argue that it's 6x as nice like the price would imply. I suppose you could consider it a luxury good? But in my mind, it feels weird to lump it in with a Louis Vuitton mug.

Playdate feels like it sits right in the middle of the spectrum? I dint think the price is being marked up for status related reasons. But they probably could have made something similar in functionality for a lot less money. It's just a product that's nicer than it "needs" to be.

[1]: https://www.notneutral.com/collections/siblings-lino-mug-10o...

This reminds me of a story of Diogenes the Cynic [1], who embraced minimalism to the point that he slept in a large wine jar and owned only a few simple possessions, such as his tunic and a drinking bowl. One day, he saw a boy drinking water from a trough by cupping his hands and bringing it to his mouth, so Diogenes threw away his drinking bowl and stated that the boy had found true minimalism because "nature had already provided him with a cup."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes#Asceticism

load some games you think you'll enjoy. carry it around in your pocket. pull it out when bored. don't put a case on it, let it gather scratches and dirt.

I can lose 10 mins to a sudoku game or chase a highscore in some arcade-ish game without coming away with an impending sense of doom (which tends to happen with doomscrolling).

I'd compare it more with the iphone of micro handhelds than a LV bag. Tried Ambernic first, it was annoying and it randomly stopped working anyway. Steam deck and such are too much, they're for gamers and I'm no gamer. I just need a toy, and playdate happens to be the iphone of this weird niche I seem to enjoy.

Also, the devex is good, and I can build tools and apps in a weekend if I have to, and enjoy the experience.

fwiw yeah it's expensive and i much rather enjoy simple classics than most of the art projects pretending to be games in the catalog.

After developing & releasing 2 commercial games, and playing around with different game engines/frameworks over the years, I’m convinced PICO-8 is absolutely the best platform for a hobbyist game dev.

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)

Honest question - does anyone aside from the devs actually play PICO-8 games?

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.

This was honestly the same thought I had from the quote in the article from the dev who was enthusiastic about developing for a 400x240 monochrome screen. There's nothing wrong with developing something for your own happiness without caring about whether others want to use it, but it felt like it was maybe missing the fact that features like color and higher resolution were probably not introduced in devices with the idea that they were going to make development easier.

This line in the closing epilogue really resonates with me:

> 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.

"I feel as though we have strayed so far from this in modern times"

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.

The Big AI Lab LLM Industrial Complex does seem a pull back to the era of thin clients & thick servers. You will own nothing.

Recently I showed my 7-yr-old son and a friend of his how they could build their own little video games with the Claude app. Simple stuff, make me a maze game, make the walls move sometimes, make it bigger, make there be a score.

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.

Games that allow custom map is not that new. Minecraft also allows you some basic boolean mechanism that you can build surprisingly complex stuff. I don't know why do you need AI for this

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