Opinion: Apple Watch will be a disaster for gaming

I've spent years watching the intertwined industries of gadgets and gaming. And I can't recall an Apple release that's landed anywhere near as badly as that of the Apple Watch.

I've heard little other than hoots of derision from every quarter.

It's not hard to see why. Overpriced and under-equipped doesn't even cover half of it. For the money you might spend on an Apple Watch you could net a standard luxury timepiece that won't become obsolete in a year.

If it could manage its smart functions by itself then it would, at least, save some space in your pockets. But it can't. You still have to carry your phone. What's more, that phone needs Bluetooth on to communicate with the watch, so its battery will drain faster.

You spend all that money, and all you get is more things that need to spend more time plugged in to the charger.

But we're not here to talk about its shortcomings as a device. We're gamers, so we're here to talk about its shortcomings as a game platform.

We've been here before, of course. When I was a kid, Nintendo had a product snappily titled Game & Watch which combined a portable LCD game with a timepiece. They were very popular, because they were cool and new and little kids love cool, new stuff.

Little kids are also stupid. After playing with Game & Watch for five minutes, we all realised that playing on such a tiny screen with cramped controls was rubbish. So we went back to playing stick and hoop, or whatever it was we did before iPads were a thing.

Nothing has changed in the intervening thirty years (yes, I am that old, which explains why I'm so grumpy about new stuff) that solves those fundamental problems. We can now fit powerful processors and a high resolution screen into a wristwatch.

But no technology can magically make the watch bigger when we want to play with it. It's still gaming on a tiny screen with cramped controls.

That's limiting enough on a mobile. It'll be worse on a watch, regardless of the number of pixels on the screen.

"But what about the accelerometer?" I hear you cry. Well, yes. Having the thing strapped to your wrist does allow for a much bigger range of motion control for games. Whether the hardware will be up to detecting such nuance is a moot point, but it's not impossible or even unlikely.

Just step back a minute. You were theorizing about controlling a game, on a watch, by wildly waving your arms around. The same arm to which you've strapped your super-expensive watch, right?

So, even if you can stop worrying about that colossally valuable object flying off your wrist for a second and concentrate on the game, how are you going to see the screen?

This whole thing about accelerometer control is a non-starter. Current games that make use of the device either have to be careful about how they do it, or they have to be rubbish. Tilts and shifts need to allow the player fine control while still letting them see the screen. That's going to be impossible on a watch.

Let alone the obvious point that your wrist isn't as capable of fine-grained control as hands and fingers. It didn't evolve for that. It's just there to stop your hands falling off the ends of your arms.

If someone were going to develop a functional game for a wristwatch, it would have to be simple. App Store developers have demonstrated that with creativity, simple can go a long way. So maybe the future isn't as bleak as I'm painting it.

Except that we've gone way too far down that rabbit hole already.

Look, as a mobile gamer I appreciate the value of simplicity. It's great that we have lots of games now that have wide appeal and have helped bring gaming into the mainstream. But after years of evolving in that direction, where do we end up? Free to play, that's where.

A smartwatch is only going to make that worse.

Gamers on other platforms have already become derisory about the stripped back nature of mobile games. When I reviewed Vietnam...'65 recently I made a point of saying that its approachability made it a good candidate for mobile. But one Steam user on the identical PC version of the game called it "app-a-alike". Many others used "app store game" as a term of abuse.

Is that really an attitude we want to be encouraging in our peers?

We don't just have to speculate, though. We can put some of these ideas to the test by looking at the first wave of games announced for the Apple Watch.

Exhibit A is an update to Hatchi, a current retro-game that allows you to take care of a Tamagotchi-like pet, rendered with realistically crap graphics. They're crap because Tamagotchi was all the rage in 1996. So your high-tech, high-res screen is going to be used to display massive, chunky pixels.

There's Letterpad, a new game that appears to owe a great deal to the physical letter game Boggle. Boggle came out in 1972. And which already has an App Store version. Admittedly, it looks like a weak adaptation. But playing it on a smartwatch is only going to make it weaker.

I've also heard there's going to be a trivia game called Elementary Minute. The first part of the name being inspired by Sherlock Holmes no doubt, because trivia games were a popular parlour activity for the Victorians.

The Apple watch isn't just useless: for gaming it's actively dangerous. A device that threatens to drag the hobby even further back in time than GamerGate has. Just resist. Just say no. And spend the money you saved on something that really will improve your mobile gaming experience, like a current generation iPad.