A hoard of barbarians, catapults, and horses bears down on my castle walls. With one finger I fling them high, high into the air so they plummet to their deaths. Awash in the glory of my brutal power, not to mention the graphical splendour of these stick figure nemeses, I sow devastation with a simple, repetitive motion of my hand – stroking up, up, up, up on the right side of the screen, as fast as my burning wrist can manage. Stick figures and horse drawings rain down upon a botchy painting that appears to have been whipped up by a third grader. At long last, here is the gaming experience of the future!

I’m picking on Stick Wars for the iPhone, but I’m certainly no sophisticate. A good joke about flatulence, or just someone experiencing it in real life, will, without fail, entertain me for some time. I’d say Beavis and Butthead has as much claim to the title ‘art’ as anything hanging in the Louvre. And why not? Being lowbrow and silly serves an important role in human existence, just as releasing waste gases from metabolised food does. For the iPhone, Stick Wars is actually pretty decent. Its repetitiveness and simplicity are staples of games on this platform – and at least it has functional controls and isn’t a clone.

Imagine what you would have thought if you’d heard about this device ten years ago. The iPhone’s CPU is faster than a PS2’s. It can be controlled by tilting it, touching the screen, speaking to it, and taking photos with it. It fits in a pocket, is always present, and can access your music collection and contact info. It connects to the internet, and it connects friends via phone lines and text messages. It can show your position on a map, right down to the street corner, which is better than the automap of every game I’ve worked on. The iPhone has the potential to empower an imaginative new breed of games the world has been waiting for without realising it.

Just as iTunes helped revolutionise the sale of digital music, the App Store could be a distribution model that loosens big corporations’ stranglehold on the games industry and fosters a legitimate indie market. Like indie films, indie games are culturally important, but it’s harder to make a living as an indie game developer than as an indie filmmaker, given comparable levels of success. The App Store could change that by dramatically lowering the overhead required to reach a large audience. Developing for the iPhone is easy and cheap, especially compared to the many thousands of dollars that a devkit costs for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo platforms. There are no boxed goods, so you don’t have to engage an expensive thirdparty manufacture and distribution channel. Publication is effortless and under the developer’s control from launch date to price point, to periodic updates. A small team can push a risky idea all the way through from concept to purchase without having to struggle against the hesitations of financial backers.

The iPhone installed base is about 40 million [as of time of writing in June 2009], which compares comfortably to the Wii’s 50 million, the Xbox 360’s 30 million, the PS3’s 22 million, and (cough) the DS’s 100 million. These players are receptive and will try anything. Some of the most popular apps involve activities such as winding up wooden sculptures in a length of rope, playing ocarinas online over a virtual globe, and sadistically torturing cartoon natives on a tropical island. They are simple games with some interesting ideas going on, much like Stick Wars.

We also see the App Store glutted with software about farting, drinking beer, jiggling boobs, holding lighters aloft, artillery bombardment, and struggling to position crosshairs over a variety of animals and humans. And why? Let’s consider the laws of this new frontier. Something like 8,000 apps are added to the store every month. Given that staggering amount of competition, a necessary piece of promotion is making sure that your app hits the charts, the higher up, the better. Since chart ranking is determined by units sold, a cheaper app is more likely to chart. Maintaining a high chart position rakes in the loot, so if you’re in it for the gold rush, your best bet is a simple, low production game like Stick Wars, or a clone with a known design and demographic, or something with shock value that will grab attention. The abundance of submissions along these lines shapes the audience’s perception of the device. Shopping at the App Store is like filling your arms with candy bars at a 99 cent store. If most of the candy tastes like poo, it’s no big deal. It’s even kind of fun.

Nothing against fart jokes, but when will we get those games we’ve been waiting for without realising it? Are the big publishers going to make them? Could any indie studio afford to develop bold, new concepts into a game worth more than 99 cents? Would such games rise to the top of the charts on their merit? Or are they already there, lurking in the bottom 99.8 per cent that we have almost no way to hear about?

Randy Smith is the co-owner and game designer of Tiger Style, whose first game, Spider, is shortly due for release.