Video games should be more weird

I thought a lot about the surprise announcement made yesterday by Playdate, the new gaming experience of Fire picket Panic publisher. More than anything else, it's strange: a small, single-use pocket computer with a mysterious 12-week gaming program is the kind of thing that needs your attention. And yes, he has a crank. It's a clever way to market what happens when smart people spit on for a few years without thinking too much about trying to sell their jam sessions. This raises the question: why are games not so weird? And who has the luxury of being weird in the video game industry?

Playdate is strange, and it's strange because games – at least the biggest and most monolithic games – are not. Why should they be? The modern big budget video game publisher has the behavior of an ordinary video game player as a science. They know that people will spend money on FIFA Ultimate Team, or Fortnite Battlepasses. They know where each murder on a Call of Duty card is going on, and how much each destiny the weapon is used. They know the road each player takes to reach a goal Ghost Recon: Wildlands– and they show you what they know, via an in-game thermal card that you can use.

You are not a mystery to the modern video game publisher. You are data. A plan is in place for you, a plan that worked well, with the exception of the occasional microtransaction controversy. And the games are selling.

In this environment, we are hungry for what is strange and unusual. This is partly why it is easy to hold Nintendo in such high esteem. Consider his last decade of ideas: a modular console with a configuration for each form of game. A cardboard game board to create your own devices and learn to program. A portable console that launched the idea of ​​3D without glasses. A home-controlled console with something that looks like a TV remote.

These are all things that nobody asked for. In addition, they are not all winners or fully performant in all that they proposed to do. Of course, the Wii U failed, but not the 3DS, even if its central innovation did not take at all. The strangeness was thrilling. One of the biggest names in video games still wants to offer us new ways to play, even if they do not break down.

Doing strange things is risky, and the entire entertainment industry is less likely to take risks, from movies to television to books and video games. Secure bets are the name of the game, where the risk is better supported by individuals than by companies. Initiatives by companies like Sony and Microsoft, presented as innovative – streaming video games, integrated sharing capabilities, cloud services – only consolidate existing popular business models in one place, while businesses expand to other sectors of entertainment and technology. Stadia, Google's adventurer facing a revolutionary future without a console, is not such a shocking idea that it is a desired terminus for many existing customers.

The risk of being odd therefore often comes down to independent creators who bear the risk by themselves. To find a truly innovative job, you need to focus on people who have not been in the mainstream for some time. Queer artists and color-game designers develop role-playing games and games on giant fights with Afro-futuristic robots, giving us a look at strange worlds and future faraway from the familiar. They are strange and that's what makes them good. They are not safe.

That's what makes Playdate so attractive. It does not really make sense. As it says, it's more of a game than a game – more an impromptu street performance than an actual album, or even a concert. It's new, a way to import into the fake pop-up games of the pop-up Instagrammable museum, marrying it to the trendy kitsch of Tamagotchi. Most game consoles are not designed to go out, but for Playdate.

And Playdate is praised for that. We love this idea and many others. It's "weird", it's "adorable" and, more importantly, it's credible. Panic is a newcomer to the industry, but he published Fire picket, which allowed to release a certain threshold of taste. But I wonder how playdate really can be a novel: although there is a team of talented designers who worked on the console, it is not very diverse.

The programming of Playdate's first "season" of 12 games, and the creators of these games are a surprise, but the list of captivating creators launched to tease us is rather white and exclusively male. And although the presence of the maestro of strange games, Keita Takahashi, cross my fingers so that the rest of the alignment compensates for that, it's a pity. Video games are bulky, weird, and the limits to which they end up perpetually do not deserve to be overwhelmed; they deserve to be broken by people who have never really had a chance to do it. Being weird is good, but the games could still be weird. And we will never know how much to give more people the chance to surprise us.