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My heart used to leap at the sight of a bussing businessman, clothes smartly pressed, stooping like a flower toward the light of a Nintendo DS screen. Now it’s mostly phones. Occasionally, I catch someone with a 3DS, and I crane to glimpse whatever has pulled them out of the half-life of the morning commute. When it comes to the Nintendo Switch, I needn’t worry about catching anyone; they give the game away themselves, looking as if they had pried a laptop screen free of its base. As much as I’m fond of the machine, its nature as a hybrid means it never truly plants a flag in the hand or the home. As such, I feel we’ve been tricked into agreeing to a time without a proper handheld machine.
Last week, Playdate was revealed. My heart skipped a bit when I first saw Panic’s new handheld console: The colour, the crank, and the clutch of indie games lovingly posted to you (downloaded, obviously, but let’s dream) one by one every Monday. For twelve Mondays. Tearing into this month’s Edge Magazine for the exclusive reveal feature, I pored over the pictures of this contraption – and that’s exactly what it is: a contraption – designed by voguish Swedish company Teenage Engineering. It strikes me as a brilliant act of defiance in a time when Google is disrupting the way we play, dragging us kicking and streaming into the terrifying future.
And what’s handheld gaming if not an act of defiance? For me, it’s long been tinged with the same streak of mischievous pleasure as skipping school, and it’s often been as nourishing. There’s something delicious about it: some notion that time isn’t for filling but for frittering, and that dedicated frittering may be its own sort of fulfilment. (It’s for this reason that phones fail me – games should never have to clamour above the noise of texts and Twitter notifications.) But, more than that, handhelds suggest that the entire world should present no impediment to play – that games aren’t some substitute for going outside, for when real play is rained off, but that they are a pursuit worth pursuing out the front door.
There are two schools of handheld gaming, both of which have beguiled me at various points in my life. The first is the wonderfully stubborn Sony school, which rails against the thinking that handheld games should be lesser to the ones we have at home. Sony’s approach, as embodied in the sleeked plastic of the PSP, was one of graphical firepower. You have to admire the fire of its disdain for compromise (making the machine’s lack of a second analogue stick all the more baffling.) It was a system for dreamers: for those that longed for the future so hard they wallowed in its wonderful specs – 4.3 inches of screen! 333 MHz CPU! My love of the PSP is christened with the memory of a business studies class at school: sniping a friend through the windshield of their Stallion as they tried to run me down, in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. I had no time for the lesson; there was business to attend to.
The second is the Nintendo DS school, which feels no need to ape what’s available in the living room and sees liberation, not limitation, in the confines of a handheld. It also helped that the DS is inherently contraption-like. It seemed the product of imagination piled high to toppling point. Not one but two screens, one of them touch-sensitive; a stylus, drawn from the back like a sword; and a microphone?! For every limitation in graphics or sound, there were portholes through which the imagination could soar. The DS was easy, born to be scuffed and dog-eared, and, like a book, it would open and close, letting you dip in for as long as you’d like.
It’s this second school that the Playdate seems to spring from, and it’s obvious the moment you see it. The first thing you notice is everything. A body like solid sunshine, dotted with bits of brushed steel, from which protrudes the grace note: the crank, unclasped from the frame and wound like a fishing reel. It’s the stuff of stupid dreams, gathered up and smelt into a lump consumer electronics. But why should a wadge of metal and glass inspire such happiness? Perhaps its tied to the subtle splicing of simplicity on show; the boxy shape, the two buttons, and the unlit black-and-white screen evoke a 30-year-old pang of longing for that monolith of youth, the Game Boy.
It strikes me as the sort of device that laughs at limitation, and the first few games to flash past in the announcement seem to flaunt their inventiveness. Keita Takahashi and his Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure looks like a pared and puckish spin on The Gardens Between, but – though I enjoyed it – that game wasn’t crank-operated. This one is. On top of that we have a spread of tempting titles: Executive Golf DX (imagine winding up for a swing!), Bennett Foddy Presents Zipper (whose name alone I’m having trouble getting over), and something called 360, which delightfully invites us to ‘crank to start.’ Then there’s Zach Gage and Shaun Inman, makers of SpellTower and The Last Rocket, respectively, who have yet to reveal their games.
Clearly, its power to draw people in with sheer joie de vivre isn't limited to potential players. For me, the appeal of Playdate is a curious thing. It would seem a rebellious console, like the Neo Geo Pocket Colour, but it lacks the attitude. Its wayward style doesn't warp into the suspicious realm of the zany, like the Gizmondo. It could provoke charges of gimmickry or of being a hipster-cool objet d'art – more desirable as a thing than as a console – but it seems to me an important symbol of where we're at: an objet du temps. In a world bustling with blockbuster games, crammed with DLC roadmaps and microtransactions, and teetering toward a cloud-bound future that sheds hardware like a crusty skin, Playdate seems to beckons us toward a brighter yesterday.
