[Warning: This post contains spoilers about Playdate Season 2. Stop here if you’re going in to it fully blind.]
In case you missed it (and you probably did), the little yellow Playdate gaming device recently got a couple.of big updates. The first – actual networking functionality – is a fairly drastic shift away from a device I’ve often enjoyed because of its offline nature.
However it also means the second big update – a second “season” of games (or a bundle, released gradually but regularly) – has been able to launch with a welcome and intriguing surprise that puts the Playdate even further into “niche” territory.
Subscribers to Season 2 last week were greeted not by the expected two new games to unwrap, but by three. The third turned out to be an app called Blippo+, something which had been teased for a while, and which turns out (so far?) to be a sort of “Alien TV” app, streaming a variety of short clips in very low-grade quality, from somewhere far away in the cosmos. It even has a small Teletext equivalent.
Rather than dwelling further on the app or the content though, I’m excited by what Panic (the Playdate developers) are doing with the device more generally here. It’s fairly clear that the device is and was always a bit of a passion project rather than a profit one. I mean, it’s great that it seems to be doing well enough in the world, but what I love about it is that it feels like Panic are making stuff to just have fun. As if we all know that the world is a bit shit, and hey wouldn’t it be cool if we made stuff that wasn’t for once?
There’s a fine line here, but I do think that, with the arrival of Blippo+ alongside several other ideas and apps attached to it, the Playdate is entering firmly into what I see as the world of “curio tech”. And I applaud that.
The history of technology is filled with ideas that, let’s face it, haven’t necessarily aged well – or even seemed very appropriate when they were released. While the smartphone and tablet and PC all became unimaginably mainstream, there is a litany of other products which were released, tried to fill a gap, and got passed over and forgotten about fairly quickly.
Devices such as the Nokia N-Gage, the Game Boy Camera (and printer), the Divoom Tiivoo, and even the Pebble Watch – and loads more (the Power Glove, anybody?). Devices that feel of their time – but in a way that reflects more on what our current era says about us. Devices that we still want to love, even if they’re anachronistic or unfeasible.
Now the Playdate fits in here in a strange way – because it knows it’s a curio, in a weird post-modern way. (Or perhaps post-profit.way.) It doesn’t need the judgement of time to say whether it has “succeeded” or “failed” because it is already embracing its own quirkiness. It is Punk in that sense – it doesn’t care if you like it or not. It merely enjoys and revels in the fact that it exists.
There will always be a special place in the museum of my heart for such curio devices. As the world rumbles towards the singularity of standardisation and the mainstream, such out-of-placers remain steadfast pockets of excitement. It feels like there’s an increasing need to take back the very idea of personal enjoyment among a sea of branded content.
Curio tech is important not just because it offers something different, but because it reminds us that different is possible.
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