Doing his best Kanye West impression, id Software’s very own John Carmack went on record, as recently as last August, saying: “The truth is that Steve Jobs doesn’t care about videogames.” Carmack’s statement follows years of frustration in trying to get the house that Jobs rebuilt to focus on his chosen medium. In 2007, Valve Software founder Gabe Newell painted a more schizophrenic portrait of Apple evangelists professing to understand the importance of interactive entertainment, and yet ultimately doing nothing about it. ‘‘We have this pattern with Apple,” Newell said, “where we meet with them, people there go, ‘Wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming’. And then we’ll say, ‘OK, here are three things you could do to make that better’, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything.”

There’s no denying the under-supported market that is gaming on the Mac, yet for a company that has been accused of being uninterested in videogames, Apple has certainly done a 180 with the iPhone. During the autumn of 2008, while I was still a senior writer with Newsweek, I met with Apple’s vice president of hardware product marketing, Greg Joswiak, during his whistle-stop tour to promote games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. At that point – which was not even a full 18 months after the iPhone’s debut – Joswiak trumpeted the fact that there were already more than 6,000 games available for the device. By the time the 2009 Game Developers Conference rolled around last March, that number had jumped to 8,000. And a recent trip to Los Angeles revealed that Apple had plastered the city’s bus shelters and billboards with ads specifically promoting the iPhone as a gaming platform.

Given Apple’s recent track record on videogames, I don’t believe that this was in the company’s original playbook for the iPhone. But with games totalling a quarter of all App Store sales, this was finally too critical an element of Apple’s early success in this space for its higher-ups to ignore. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to detect the reasons for Apple’s win: its persistent online connectivity, its easy-to-use App Store and the alreadyestablished pricing model of 99 cents as a baseline for paid content have made the iPhone the perfect vehicle for making impulse purchases. Not to mention the fact that a touchscreen and an accelerometer are more accessible – and playful – than the five-way navigation and T9 pads that typified the pre-iPhone mobile phones.

On the developer side, the inexpensiveness of Apple’s software development kits drew a large number of developers who would have otherwise never considered developing for dedicated gaming devices, whether they be handhelds such as DS and PSP or home consoles including Wii, 360 or PlayStation 3. And without the barrier to entry of physical retail – the tyranny of the $60 game, as I’ve previously termed it in this space – these developers weren’t captives of the preconceived notions of what makes a game. Just look at the reception that Wii Music received from traditional game reviewers, who insisted that it was a toy, not a game.

The t-word might be considered a pejorative term on consoles, but it most certainly is not on the iPhone, where apps as varied as Smule’s interactive audio application Ocarina and InfoMedia’s interactive farting application iFart can sit happily alongside Sega’s Super Monkey Ball and ngmoco’s Rolando. There’s something liberating about play that isn’t tied to ideas of progression and advancement, but is rather play for play’s sake. And this is why, when I was discussing the iPhone with Ubisoft’s North American president, Laurent Detoc, I said that in my opinion, the least interesting thing that Ubisoft could do would be to make traditional videogames for the iPhone. Instead, it would be more interesting for the company to bring a traditional game developer’s expertise with playful mechanics and user interfaces to other types of applications. These might include programs aimed at shopping, navigation, finance and so on.

An excellent example of this kind of thinking is the photo application that’s included with Nintendo’s handheld DSi. My first impulse was to ridicule it when Nintendo came by my former offices to provide a demonstration; why enable users to manipulate the images before they’ve taken the picture instead of after? But then I realised that while Nintendo’s decision ran counter to my years of shoot-then-edit experience, edit-then-shoot was the more playful approach. The play’s the thing and, whether it’s more by accident than by design, the iPhone ecosystem is proof that Apple has finally learned how to follow through on its gaming promises.

N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.