The Packbats' Weblog

"So, open source implementations of the API are great because it makes you feel safer that your cartridges are going to live forever and there's more things you can do with it. And, you know, in the long term, I'm, y'know, working hard to make sure that no one will lose their PICO-8 cartridges.

"But, ah, but there are good reasons for it being close source. Part of it is that there is a very large secret basement to PICO-8 that I don't want anyone to know about yet. (...please don't tell anyone.)" [audience laughter] "And also, I think if it was open source at this point, there would be many variations of PICO-8 that would sort of eat away at that shared experience. You know, everyone knows what PICO-8 is - how big a cartridge is, what the pallete and screen limitations are - and that why it's valuable, I think.

"So, over time, you know, it should be more open and fixable and safe, you know, safe in regards to preserving software; but it would be bad in the short term for that reason. So there's good and bad things about the open source business."

- Joseph White, PRACTICE 2018

The longer we have spent working with PICO-8 as a tool, the more we've come to appreciate that the virtual console idea is really the least important part of what PICO-8 does. "Virtual console" is a framing for communicating about PICO-8 - for telling us, people who are not Joseph White, that the thing he made will put restrictions on us, that it's not designed to use the full power of our computers, and that what we make with it is fully ours rather than just mods on someone else's thing - but PICO-8 was not designed to help people make games they would have made on the NES or Apple II or Commodore 64 or Amiga 1000 more conveniently.

PICO-8 was designed to inspire.

It won't do that for everyone, and that's fine - nothing will inspire everyone - but:

• PICO-8's restrictions are there to condense the space of possibilities into one with a greater density of joy, and therefore to inspire.
• PICO-8's scale is small to make small projects fun - you can't do much, so doing a little feels allowed, feels significant, feels worth being inspired about.
• PICO-8's scale is small to keep it light - much of the optimization is done for you, so you don't have let the 'am I going make people's computers grind to a halt?' question get in the way of your inspiration.
• PICO-8's options are restricted, so you can become familiar with all the pieces and connect any idea you have with what pieces it would use - and use the pieces themselves to inspire new ideas.
• PICO-8 carts are easy to share, which means that there are a lot of them, which means that folks like us can get a feeling for "this exists, has an identity, and is available to anyone - and I'm an anyone, and I can play too".
• PICO-8 makes a space for you. A new cart in PICO-8 has no source code, nothing on the map, and only eight pixels of a single "fyi this sprite won't work on the map" sprite drawn on the sprite sheet. You start it up or type "REBOOT" and there is nothing to clear out of your way before you start.
• PICO-8 has competent documentation. ...*flails wildly* that is so useful and it frustrates me when tools don't have that. If you want to do something in PICO-8, you can probably look up what you need to know in the PICO-8 manual, and if it's not in the manual, it's probably in the regularly-updated-and-fairly-comprehensive wiki. You don't have to stop being inspired to go try to find a person who's available and willing to explain how something works - you can just read how to do it and do it.

There are a lot of reasons to not use PICO-8 - we have plenty of game ideas that we cannot fit on a 128x128 pixel screen or in a 32kb file, for example - but for anyone designing one, the words "virtual console" I think become an impediment to understanding PICO-8 and why it works. It works because it exists to inspire.

As a sociological relic, The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet is an interesting book.

As a book of advice, The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet is a superb book - but you may save a great deal of time by a simple method: turn immediately to Part Three and stop immediately upon reaching Part Four.

Some quotes:

1—About saving time.

Is there no time you can reclaim, not from your work, not from your exercise, not from your family or friends, but from pleasure that really does not give you much pleasure, from empty talk at the Club, from inferior plays, from doubtfully enjoyable week ends or not very profitable trips?

[...]

Do you know how to gather up fragments of time lest they perish? Do you realize the value of minutes? One of the Lamoignons had a wife who always kept him waiting a few minutes before dinner which in those days was in broad daylight, at three o'clock. After a time it occurred to him that eight or ten lines could be written during this interval, and he had paper and ink laid in a convenient place for that purpose. In time—for years are short but minutes are long—several volumes of spiritual meditations were the result. Mankind might be divided between the multitude who hate to be kept waiting because they get bored and the happy few who rather like it because it gives them time for thought. The latter lead the rest, of course.

---

There are in the daily press a number of writers, male and female, who make it a point to have an opinion about everything. Day after day, four or five hundred words from their pens appear in which they express their views on an immense variety of subjects, most of them interesting. An expert runs little risk of erring in estimating how much time these fellow-writers of his have devoted to each individual question. It can be counted in minutes rather than in hours. The authors have seldom referred to any literature, even to an encyclopædia, they have been satisfied with summing up their own flimsy knowledge of the data and their flimsier impression of them. Yet, this is so much better than nothing that we read the articles through.

---

Some people imagine they have to write a book as, at fifteen, they had to write an essay, whether they liked it or not. All the time they are at work on a chapter which ought to monopolise their attention, they are anxious over future chapters still unborn and even unconceived, and the anxiety throws its shadow over the page just being written. As long as an author does not take the habit of "only writing his book," as Joubert says, "when it is finished in his mind," or cannot honestly say, like Racine: "My tragedy is done, now I have only to write the verses," he will be a prey to the schoolboy's error. Nothing is as exciting as the hunt after thoughts or facts intended to elucidate a question we think vital to us, and the enjoyment of writing when the hunt has been successful is an unparalleled reward for intellectual honesty. Leave only the slavish necessity or the meretricious desire for producing a book and all the pleasure will be gone.

---

A fascinating book.

Went to the College Park comic shop again today (it's changed names again ... I neglected to ask how much the t-shirts were with the new logo, but they were pretty sweet). Been reading the one-volume English edition of Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and just wanted to type a quote. Double-space indicates panel boundary.

Marjane: We Iranians are the Olympic champions when it comes to gossip.

Dad: She's right. We love to exaggerate.

Mom: You seem to have the opposite symptom.
Dad: Why do you say that?

Mom: Even when you see something with your own eyes, you need confirmation from the BBC.
Dad: My natural optimism just leads me to be skeptical.

(Of course, much of Persepolis is much less lighthearted. It takes place in modern Iran - it is a place of much sadness.)