# Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

Some time ago - I don't remember exactly when or exactly how,
this post has been sitting on my severely cluttered mental back
burner for probably over a year now - I learned of the existence
of the Bandai WonderSwan[1,2], a delightfully named handheld gaming
console released only in Japan in 1999.  I'd never heard of it and
was really surprised by this; not because I'm any kind of expert
on handheld consoles, but just because back in the days when I
was building my Z80 machine and was really interested in early
consumer computing architectures, I thought I did a relatively
deep dive, reading about all kinds of obscure home computers,
business computers, game consoles, and so on, and this included,
I thought, a lot of "the Japanese scene".  I knew about the MSX
machines, the PC-98, FM Towns Marty, Sharp X68000, and so forth,
I knew about the failed VirtualBoy, and that there used to be
a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicon.  Somehow the WonderSwan
never came across my radar.  It's a really interesting device,
along with its successors the WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal.
They were not terribly commercially successful, despite having a
whole lot of really ahead-of-their-time seeming slot-in hardware
accessories available, including a GPS receiver that allowed you to,
no joke, play PacMan using the actual streets of Tokyo as the map
by walking around, a full 15 years before the arrival of Pokemon Go,
and also an MP3 player.

Anyway, this post is not actually about the WonderSwan.
It's about a design philosophy espoused by the man who lead
its development, Gunpei Yokoi[3], who was also responsible for the
much better known Nintendo GameBoy and Game & Watch products,
as well as the aforementioned failed VirtualBoy.  Yokoi was
an advocate of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"
(枯れた技術の水平思考), apparently also translated as
"Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology".  The idea here, in a
commercial video gaming context, is to come up with fun and novel
applications of well-tested, affordable and reliable electronics,
instead of chasing the latest and greatest technological innovations,
which is likely to result in longer and more expensive R&D phase,
and also runs of the risk of designing games which show off the
technology as a first concern rather than focusing on making them
fun and engaging.  Supposedly the original GameBoy launched with a
monochrome screen despite the contemporary Sega GameGear and Atari
Lynx using colour.  This gave the GameBoy a much longer battery life
than its competitors, which is of course a very important feature
for a handheld machine.  A really fun black and white game is also,
of course, more engaging than a mediocre game that's in colour just
because colour is new and exciting.  Supposedly Nintendo has retained
this philosophy, even after Yokoi first left the company after the
VirtualBoy debacle and then died in a car accident a little over a
year later.  The Wii is apparently internally not much more than
a souped up GameCube, all of the value coming from the novelty
of the motion controls (I guess this explains why it only had an
analog video output, which I remember thinking at the time was
really unusual).  This doesn't feel like as good an example to me
as the "let's just stick with monochrome" of the GameBoy (or the
"let's just use the cheap displays from the pocket calculator boom"
of the Game & Watch), because the motion controls themselves seem
kind of like shiny new tech, but maybe that was also a way to take
advantage of a glut of cheap accelerometers from some other market?

It seems to me that "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"
would make an excellent slogan and philosophy for at least some
facets of the permacomputing movement.	In some sense that's kind
of an empty thing to say because I still think nobody really knows
what permacomputing is at this point in time.  It's used to mean a
bunch of things by a bunch of different people, and there's some
kind of conceptual overlap between all those senses but I also
think there are under-appreciated tensions as well.  I'm still
personally really hung up, perhaps to an irrational degree, on the
contradiction of a movement that has environmentalism close to its
centre engaging in the design and manufacture of new hardware, even
if it's Watt-sipping, offline-first, e-paper, designed-for-repair
open hardware.	I'm tempted by some of those gadgets from time
to time, but I'm still pretty firmly on team "salvage computing".
The world is drowning in discarded computers that still work just
fine.  Some of the work to be done in harvesting those resources is
"just technical", such as figuring out how to jailbreak locked-down
devices, or doing the work of re-capping old power supplies to
bring machines back to life.  But I think there's conceptual work
to be done, too - lateral thinking.  Not just keeping old machines
alive for as long as possible, but coming up with fun and novel
applications for those machine, thinking entirely outside the
confines of their intended roles.  Obviously this line of thought
doesn't really apply to hardware which is already designed and
packaged as a general purpose computing device, but it does apply to
all those innumerable devices which *are* general purpose computing
devices but are dressed up otherwise.  This includes game consoles,
handheld or not, but an awful lot of other things too.	Few of
them are truly well-suited to being turned into general purpose
computing devices - game consoles without USB ports won't easily
support anything like a keyboard, for example, which limits their
usefulness - but they may be well-suited to something besides their
original application and that's where the lateral thinking comes in.
Old e-readers turned into clocks or calendars is one example that
comes to my mind, although I admit it's not the most compelling.
There must be better examples out there, and if you know of any
I'd like to hear them!

The real value of this approach is that it draws attention quite
directly to the fact that obsolescence is largely a social construct.
It teaches people to stop equating "no longer supported by the
company that made it" or "no longer the best solution to the
specific problem it was marketed to solve" with "no longer useful".
It encourages people to think not only about what kinds of things
a device can do, but what kinds of things they need or would
like a device to be able to do.  It's a more active, intentional
and creative approach to permacomputing than designing greener
incarnations of existing types of device to be used in line with
existing paradigms (not that there isn't room to some extent for
both approaches, and certainly not that the results of one can't
inform the other!).  There's something playful about it, which is
a nice foil to the grim sense of moral obligation which (probably
rightly) accompanies so much sustainable computing discourse
(especially the stuff written by yours truly).

UPDATE 2024-04-18: Anna (aka agk)[4] and The Free Thinker[5] both
wrote responses to this post.  I will write a response to them in
the near future!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WonderSwan
[2] https://wonderswan.fandom.com/wiki/Wonderswan_Wiki
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi
[4] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/agk/2026-04-14-lat.txt
[5] gopher://aussies.space:70/0/~freet/phlog/2026-04-17RE_Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology.txt