I'm Arun Venkatesan, and this is the arun.is newsletter, where I share my current obsessions, inspiration from around the web, behind-the-scenes content, and more. This week's issue covers a few things:

• What’s new
• Constraints and fun
• Recommendations

What’s new

How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

While doing some research into Japan's numerous different railway systems, I fell down a rabbit hole that led to this post about the JR logo. It also made it to the Hacker News front page with some comments.

Japanese symbols that speak without words

Another topic that came out of my research into Japan was this second post about Japanese symbols. It also made it to the Hacker News front page with a bunch of comments.

Good bye, Om Malik

I unfortunately had to say bye to a friend a few weeks ago. I had been meaning to meet up with him and even bumped into him in SF but let life get away and alas now he is gone. I wrote a tribute to him and also link to tributes that others have written as well

Daily Designer

It has been just over a month since I launched Daily Designer and it continues to be an interesting experiment for me. I'm going to try it out for a few more weeks and then reassess if I want to continue this project or pause it indefinitely.

Constraints and fun

I fell in love with the Playdate the moment I saw it at XOXO 2019. A small, yellow, funky-looking plastic slab with a crank mechanism sticking out of its side. It didn't resemble anything else in the gaming world. I knew that there were no focus groups or strategy decks involved in its creation

Others seem to assume that more resources, more power, and more options lead to more creativity and fun. I've come to believe it's often the opposite — that constraints are what lead to creativity. You look through history and the Game Boy outsold the technically superior competition. The Wii, running on hardware from the previous generation, beat out the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The Playdate has an old-fashioned black and white screen and a crank. Why are these so interesting?

A couple of things happen when you remove options. First, they force a different question — not "what should we make?" but "what can we make given what little we have?" It's actually much easier to operate creatively within smaller conditions.

Second, they seem to push developers toward play. When you can't get caught up trying to beat others in raw power or realism, you end up focusing on something that matters more than anything else in gaming: fun. Nintendo's most successful consoles are pretty weird compared to their competition.

The Game Boy had a black and white screen while competitors had color — it won out on battery life and portability. The DS brought in two screens, one of which was a touchscreen, and some games relied on its microphone and motion sensor for interesting mechanics. The Wii was shaped like a TV remote, which made it accessible to all ages.

This is what Gunpei Yokoi called lateral thinking with withered technology.

We can see what happens when constraints disappear in what happened to Xbox. This all started with the disastrous launch of the Xbox One.

Then, they spent $80 billion acquiring game studios, thinking they were going to become the Netflix of gaming — seemingly without realizing that Netflix got to its position not by getting a blank check from daddy Satya, but by incrementally innovating its way there. Then they made things worse by saying that everything is an Xbox, confusing those who still had some interest in the console. Now they're trying to reset Xbox. To what, I don’t know.

I'm not arguing that we need to go back to 8-bit everything, or that Sony, or Xbox need to compete with the Playdate. What I'm arguing is that some in the gaming industry have forgotten what gaming was all about. It was about fun, and fun requires real creativity. Creativity can't be bought. It has to be found — through the careful use of constraints.

Browsing the ever-expanding, vibrant indie gaming community shows how real constraints, such as limited personnel or very limited budgets, can lead to truly fun games.

Recommendations

Lux Tour

My wife recently turned me on to the singer Rosalía and we had the privilege to attend her Lux tour this week. it was an exquisite display of technique — her incredible vocal range, the creative uses of the human body and a limited number of props, and the numerous languages and genres that she visited.

Everyday Abundance

This podcast feels like a spiritual sibling to 99% Invisible. Each episode centers on an everyday activity or technology, like doing laundry or brushing your teeth, and it dives deep into the surprising stories of how and when they appeared

Disneyland Handcrafted

This documentary brings together rare archival footage and recordings to tell the story of how Disneyland was constructed and opened to the public in less than a year. I loved seeing the details like the clothing people were wearing and how every attraction was in fact real, including the cars in Autopia, and the steamboat.

That's it for this issue.

As always, this is my personal email, so feel free to respond directly.

Stay curious,
Arun Venkatesan