Now that the Apple Watch has hit store shelves and quickly sold out, there are even more questions about how wearables will fit into people’s modern existence. When smartphones first arrived on the scene, few people had imagined that they would become a central tool not only in people’s lives, but also in electronic entertainment. One of the new tech trends of 2015 is likely to be wearable app development, so the question is: How will people game on these devices? Will watches see the same proliferation of game-oriented apps that smartphones currently have? There’s money to be made selling games to people’s watches, but exactly how this happens will greatly depend on what works in the new form.
Game design for 15 seconds
Mobile devices revolutionized how online games worked. Previously, flash games typically tended to be point and click affairs that depended on 15 minute moments of interactivity. They were optimized to be something a person did over a coffee break or perhaps part of lunch. They were not necessarily slow paced, but they did assume that someone would be contemplating or exploring for minutes at a time, not seconds. then, with the advent of the smartphone, mobile gaming changed. Consumers went from expecting 15 minutes of engagement to one to two minutes. Games like Flappy Bird, Candy Crush, and Angry Birds all did phenomenally well in this atmosphere. They all were oriented towards “bite-sized” increments of play time. When someone takes a phone out of his or her pocket to play one of these games, they do so for just long enough to get the experience of playing a game on their phone, perhaps play a level or two, and then put their phone back in their pocket.
Watch games may lead us toward increasingly momentary intervals of interaction. Some game developers are attempting to design games that push seconds of interaction, according to Ars Technica. They are designed to be played in 15 second intervals, or the amount of time that it would take to look at a watch. Increasingly terse moments of interactivity could give way to games that are designed to be “always-on,” with commands from players that take place at specific times (or when they, themselves, physically move to new locations).
Old meets new
Mobile game developer Quo Valdis said in an interview with Venture Beat that they are interested in using the player’s body metrics for games. For example, players may be motivated to keep better sleeping hours if they can keep a virtual pet happy by resting for an appropriate period of time. This concept of integrating the user’s lived experience with games may be the next frontier in game design. What if your games traveled with you on your wrist and motivated you to be better? Because the thing that the Apple Watch does best is fitness, what if all games became an extension of fitness? Can you level up your Wizard by doing squats? When Mario jumps, will you be doing jumping jacks?
These aren’t new ideas in the design of games. They are old as creation, possibly pre-human. After all, the first measure of play was not with TVs, or even cards, boards or pieces. It was children running through a field, attempting to touch each other or not be touched. Who can gamify the movement of the human body, and is that what we’ve wanted all along?
