When Apple announced this years Apple Design Awards would focus entirely on iPhone OS development it caught the geek world by suprise, though if you look closely it was entirely unsurprising. Apple has always taken great liberty with the ADA categories using them to shine the spotlight on whatever software initiative they’re pushing at the time. It’s important to put this years ADA’s into perspective. This isn’t the Academy Awards suddenly eliminating all the acting categories and leaving only the technical achievement awards, but it does feel that way.
This years ADA will not showcase a single Mac OS X application. Apple is like a capricious parent who always has a favorite child. Right now, that child is the iPhone OS and the coders working on it are the ones that get to take prototypes to German Pubs. They probably get to visit Steve at home and have organic coffee served to them as they hash out the details of the next 10 years of the iPhone OS roadmap. The Mac OS coders are probably stuck drinking coffee in the campus cafeteria. The posh kind to be sure, but not Steve’s coffee.
So where does that leave Mac gamers? It’s an exciting and confusing time to be any sort of gamer. There’s an abundance of choice, multiplayer has matured to levels I could only have quiet wet dreams about when I was 15 trying to play Warcraft over a 56K modem, but platforms have definitely started to eclipse PC gaming (by PC I mean Personal Computers be they Windows, Mac, or Linux). Mac gamers have always been an adaptive breed, though, content to play play Civ IV with some homebrew mod several years after its release, begrudgingly accepting the limited availability of high end graphic cards on all but the most expensive systems. In short we work with what we have and almost all of us have at least one gaming console in our house to suplement our Macs limited choice.
That doesn’t mean Mac gaming is dead, things are happening, like Steam for Mac. But, as awesome as Peggle, Braid, and free versions of Portal are, I think the future of Mac gaming will be the iPhone OS. I don’t think the ADA focus on the iPhone OS means Apple have abandoned Macs, just that from a “mice should have one button” perspective the iPhone OS gives Apple what it has always wanted: absolute control of the platform and delivery. Yes its scary, and I cling to my jail-broken iPhone and iPad and play OpenTTD, but it’s where Apple’s steering this train.
In 2008 Fraser Speirs declared:
I will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.
Last week he wrote:
Simply put, I believe, the choice is this: the iPhone OS train is leaving the station in a big way with the iPad; much more so than when it was just for smartphones. I have to ask myself if there’s a train that I would rather be on. I don’t see one right now, and I don’t see one coming down the track.
His post on why he’s decided to reverse his decision and develop for the iPhone OS is a very worthy read.
The iPad has taken the idea of iPhone games as a competitor to Sony’s PSP and Nintendos DS and trumped it. Simply put there is nothing like the iPad as a gaming platform right now. Once we exhaust all the HD ports of existing games getting shoveled out the door for quick dime I think we’ll see some genuinely innovative use of the platform. The possibility is so tangible that according to the Times UK Nintendo recently called Apple the “enemy of the future” and simultaneously dismissed Sony’s efforts.
The iPad has a level of immersion only possible by having a nearly 10″ display inches from your face controlled with an accelerometer and the most intuative of controllers: your fingers. Nintendo is betting on its 3D DS as the solution to the Apple threat, but in the end the winner will be determined not by the devices themselves but by the developers that write the games. The iPad, because of its low price and clever development tools, has a huge advantage. Some of the best games of the last two years have come not from EA or Gameloft but from small indie devs who quickly understood how to innovate on the platform. Those developers have had the iPad in their hands for a month or so and they’re the ones that are looking for ways to exploit the iPad as more than just a large iPod Touch. The iPad has the potential to be a category of it’s own. Not just a portable gaming device on par with the Gameboys, PSPs, and DSs we’ve grown accustomed to, but a more potent form of gaming where you’re literally holding the window into the game world.
That said I still spend hours on my iMac and I relish the opportunity for desktop gaming. I was thrilled to read that Ars Technica decided to fill the void and create the Ars Design Awards – Mac OS X, I’m sure we’ll see some fantastic games among the nominations and we’ll review them as soon as we can. However, I still think that as Apple pushes the boundries of where they can go with the iPhone OS, it will become more apparent that iPhone OS gaming is Mac gaming. Apple’s inclusion of Game Center in the iPhone OS shows they’re taking gaming more seriously than they ever have on the Mac OS and ultimately this will be a very good thing for us gamers.
