I’ve been thinking a lot about yesterday’s surprise announcement of Playdate, the new handheld games experiment from Firewatch publisher Panic. More than anything, it’s weird: A small, single-purpose handheld with a set 12-week program of mystery games is the sort of thing that demands your attention. And yes, it has a crank.

It’s a slickly marketed way to watch what happens when clever people spitball for a few years and don’t think too much about trying to sell their jam sessions, and it begs the question: Why aren’t games weirder? And who gets the luxury of being weird in the video game industry?