Opinion: what do hardcore gamers have against the iPhone?

It’s easy to forget, as a site that covers iPhone gaming in extreme thoroughness, that Pocket Gamer is largely playing to a home crowd.

People interested in iPhone gaming have already made their mind up about the platform before they get here: all they want to do is get on with the business of enjoying their iPhone/iPod touch by reading the finest editorial on the net about the latest and greatest games for Apple’s handhelds.

But outside the safe, cushion covered walls of Pocket Gamer lies an unforgiving and suspicious internet Wild West, where many view the iPhone as an overpriced fashion accessory, with less gaming credibility than your grandmother.

Despite a genre-straddling rash of genuine gaming delights, pocket friendly prices and gushing developer support from the biggest and most respected names in the business, the iPhone still has a PR mountain to climb with the wider hardcore gaming community.

The sales figures are stratospheric and the iPhone games business is clearly in extremely rude health, but visit any gaming forum or comments thread on a site that caters chiefly to the big three (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft), and the attitude generally seems to be that openly considering the iPhone as a legitimate competitor to the DS or PSP is pure heresy.

Arrogance is unbecoming

The problem may be in the broader perception of the Apple brand.

The 'I’m a Mac' marketing campaign relishes in the idea that Mac owners are somehow superficially defined by their choice of computing platform. Members of the Apple club are creative, trendy, and intelligent, while non-members wear grey suits and deservedly fail in all their endeavours.

This was at first a decent way for Apple to exploit being the underdog to the Microsoft leviathan at a time when Apple was still in recovery mode after a punishing decade without Jobs at the helm.

In the wake of the phenomenal success of the iPhone, not to mention ever growing Macbook and iMac sales, Apple’s marketing slogan has begun to appear unapologetically arrogant and self-satisfied in the way it always threatened to. That’s one part of the problem.

The Fox and the Grapes

Then there’s Apple’s history in gaming. Apple’s has tried and failed more than once to establish itself as a gaming power. Both the ill-fated Pippin and Apple’s various attempts to attract third-party developers to the Mac as an alternative to PC gaming, left the company’s gaming reputation in tatters, giving those who decry the Apple brand as a whole something tangible to point and laugh at.

Here's the science bit: cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling commonly experienced when an individual is confronted by two contradictory ideas simultaneously.

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that when people experience dissonance, they attempt to reduce it by rationalising a solution that favours one idea over the other.

The most famous example of cognitive dissonance is Aesop’s Fable The Fox and the Grapes. In the fable, a fox spies some grapes hanging from the treetops that take his fancy.

Being a four legged creature with no earthly business climbing trees, the fox can’t think of any reasonable way to get at them. He subsequently exercises cognitive dissonance, rationalising that the grapes are probably sour and not worth the trouble.

It's a similar case with Apple. We’d never be so arrogant as to claim that the iPhone is the unattainable gaming fruit that gamers are convincing themselves is rotten (though for some younger gamers, this may be the case), but rather that the iPhone is the games console that many technology fans feel they should resent.

This means that no matter how tantalising the games or blatant the strengths of the platform, this group doesn’t allow desire to creep into their hearts, rationalising instead that the iPhone is an overpriced, underpowered laughing stock of a games console that couldn’t compete against the DS and PSP if both consoles were drunk and blindfolded.

Or it could just be that we’re the ones exercising cognitive dissonance, so invested in the iPhone as a platform that we can’t do anything other than rationalise away its flaws.

Either way, no matter how successful the iPhone is as a games machine there are clearly some who intend to remain permanently immune to its charms.