No Added Sugar: Push The Button

Doesn’t anyone else find Apple supremely irritating? Sure, their products typically exhibit the cutting edge in industrial design, and their user interface design prowess is famously unrivalled. Yet, call me a curmudgeon, a Free Software communist, or just a sore loser, but given the restrictive choices that Apple products typically offer-our way or the highway- I choose the highway every time. It’s not just the way that the company exerts paranoid control over its products through its insistence on closed software ecosystems; or the way that they thumb their nose at established computing standards in favour of proprietary alternatives. Hell, it’s not even the infamous ‘Apple Tax’ which sees Apple product users pay exorbitant prices for basic accessories like adapters and cables, as well as the computers themselves. What really gets my goat is the religious fervour that greets Apple product launches, where Apple’s well-oiled hype machine has the world’s media quite literally eating out of their hand, repeating verbatim whatever hubris and hyperbole-laden superlatives that Steve Jobs and co. have offered on that particular day. It’s the suffocating aura of smugness that pervades these presentations that I can’t stand- the studied cool, the carefully engineered choreography, and the ever-so-slightly religious undertones that represent to me at least, the ultimate in commodity fetishism. But here’s a thought: Perhaps Apple were always destined to become a major player in the videogames space. After all, for gamers, proprietary hardware, software, restrictive DRM and closed ecosystems are a fact of life, whether your system of choice is manufactured by Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft.

Of course, closed, controlled ecosystems have clear benefits when trying to build a unified, consistent platform for videogame development. Apple’s adherence to this approach has paid huge dividends with the success of their App Store, which has created a whole new market for mobile applications. While Google’s rival Android operating system has, after a slow start, finally begun to make serious inroads into the mobile app market, the company’s failure to set baseline hardware specs for Android devices have made game development in particular a compatibility nightmare for developers. Apple have long been signalling their ambitions to move into gaming- spying weaknesses in both Nintendo’s DS (poor network infrastructure; old technology; highly youth-skewed audience) and Sony’s PSP (failed physical media, iffy software support) platforms. The iPhone/ iPod Touch’s combination of large, hi-res, multitouch screen, decent graphics capabilities, download-only App Store platform and the unmistakable aura of Apple cool catapulted it to considerable success as a gaming machine. But for this author, the device has been stymied as a gaming machine by one thing more than anything else- the lack of physical buttons. This wasn’t lost on EA Sports supremo and well-known industry figure Peter Moore who suggested prior to the iPad announcement that the existence of buttons on the device would be a crucial part of determining the iPad’s gaming prowess. One would have reasonably expected, then, for the company to right this wrong with their next mobile product- after all, it’s not as if space would be at a premium like it would be on a pocketable device like the iPhone. It was with some surprise this week, then, that Apple’s much-hyped unveiling of their new tablet computer, the iPad, was met with an unusually muted reaction from the gathered Twitterati and tech journalists. Aside from the enlarged screen and new applications and services like the Kindle-baiting iBookstore, this seemed to be very much a case of evolution rather than evolution. And while I certainly won’t make the foolish mistake of writing off the iPad before it even launches, it does seem clear that that the new device doesn’t have the ‘game-changing’ characteristics of the original iPhone before it. And, speaking of games, I watched Apple’s presentation with a keen eye to see how aggressively the company were taking on Nintendo and Sony, who between them control the entire (non-phone) handheld gaming market. For me, at least, the revelation that the iPad, like the iPhone before it, would be a virtually buttonless device seemed to firmly indicate that the three tech behemoths are not quite on a collision course- at least, not yet. Don’t get me wrong- I’m all in favour of touch-screen gaming. As the first mass-market touch-screen videogames console, the Nintendo DS didn’t take long to prove that touch-screen gaming, when done right, worked a treat, and could breath new life and freshness into creaky old genres.

But for this author, the device has been stymied as a gaming machine by one thing more than anything else- the lack of physical buttons.

But the fact remains that the DS has a d-pad, shoulder buttons and face buttons- a total of 9 (counting the d-pad as a single button) for a very good reason. As many an over-ambitious developer has found, touch interaction- even multi-touch interaction- has limits, particularly in genres like racing, fighting, platforming, and frankly any genre which has complex movesets or requires precision timing. On the iPhone, where there is no stylus input and players must use their podgy digits to interact with the game, these limitations are exacerbated even further. There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule, it is in the puzzle and casual game space that the iPhone has flourished. Despite the protestations of noted iPhone dev ngmoco, who argue that iPad games will be a less ‘snacky’ experience, I believe that the sole reliance on multi-touch input means that ‘snacky’ (read: casual) titles will continue to dominate, leaving the more meaty experiences for the other consoles. The iPhone cleverly accommodated for its lack of buttons with some inventive use of multitouch and accelerometer-based control. But by and large, they are inferior- and often unplayable- substitutes for buttons. Despite the larger screen, the iPad will surely suffer the same fate. None of which is to say that games with limited player inputs can’t be any good- I’m a big proponent of simplicity in game design, and titles like Orbient and WarioWare (both on Wii) and the more recent Tomena Sanner on iPhone/WiiWare have demonstrated that compelling gameplay can be achieved with the bare minimum of controller inputs- but as a general rule, while buttonless gaming isn’t going anywhere, to dispense entirely with them seems just plain silly, and places restrictions on developers that will impact seriously on the quality and type of games that will appear on the platform. When Sony and Nintendo unveil their next-generation handheld consoles- most likely this year- you can be assured that whatever their next wacky innovation in user interface, the good old fashioned analogue button will be along for the ride. Apple may yet live to regret its omission.

See more: