A troubling trend for Nintendo and Sony seems to be under way, at least according to the market-research
firm Interpret. In a report published last November, it announced that the proportion of the ‘phone/DS/PSP gaming market’ playing games on their phones rose by more than 50 per cent over the last year, while the proportion of those playing on DS or PSP fell by 13 per cent.
Perhaps this, if true, simply reflects the logic that the best mobile gaming machine is (like the best camera) the one you always have with you. But apart from the (somewhat mystifyingly huge) success of apps such as Angry Birds, a deeper reason for a possible general migration from handheld consoles to phones suggests itself: might it be that the modern smartphone is itself already a kind of game, even before you install any games on it?
Telephony, after all, is really a shoehorned-in legacy feature of smartphones, which, like videogames, operate through a smorgasbord of visual metaphors and cybernetic syntax that seems natural and comprehensible to us only because we have experienced its gradual evolution. Surely a great number of young adults in this day and age, for example, have never used a spiral-bound agenda book, and yet that is the standard icon for a calendar app. The icon for dialling on my phone is a massive, bulbous ear-and-mouthpiece from the era of rotary-dial Bakelite telephones. Email is signified by an envelope, which is particularly odd given that one of the major differences between snailmail and email is precisely that the latter lacks anything that is analogous to an envelope. (Email is more like a postcard, with a similar level of privacy.) Perhaps most intriguingly, the icon for ‘save’ in many menus is still a floppy disk, which has been obsolete for so long that what this image now means is, exclusively, ‘save’: it is only contingently and unimportantly a representation of a once-common physical object.
Then there is the whole gestural vocabulary of the touchscreen interface: tapping, pinching-to-zoom, inertial scrolling, or swiping horizontally between virtual ‘homepages’ (a curious hangover, this term, from the ’90s Web, now leached of its optimistic implication of personalised content and indicating only a user’s chosen arrangement of icons and widgets supplied by others).
Some of these movements seem oddly reminiscent of the manipulation of cellulose-coated playing cards, already an old and ingrained metaphor in computing (Hypercard and ‘stacks’), which makes the playing of Solitaire on a touchscreen phone a curiously Russian-doll experience of cards-within-cards.
Meanwhile, the now-common ‘slider’ control on touchscreens (slide to answer or unlock) seems weirdly to half-imitate a mechanical apparatus that never really existed: because what would be the point of a real-life slider with only two states, on or off? In the physical world, a slider controls continuous values (eg, a volume fader); in the touchscreen world, it is a strangely nonsensical metaphor introduced only to solve the problem of the phone accidentally doing something in your pocket or handbag.
The modern smartphone, then, has its own complex and rather arbitrary grammar, which must be learned before you can do anything with it, or feel comfortable using different devices – just as the modern console FPS has an evolved cybernetic grammar that enables the initiate to pick up a new one easily (sticks and triggers usually do much the same thing), but proves forbidding to the novice.
And it is already a kind of pleasure to exercise one’s mastery of this grammar, even to no explicitly conceived final purpose. Hence the people you sometimes see idly swiping through pages of apps or scrolling up and down in lists, tapping here and there but apparently not trying to do anything in particular, just indulging in the cybernetic pleasure of the interface, in a kind of freeform zoned-out play. The fact that there is no win-state to this kind of idle interaction does not prevent it from being a game, just as Noby Noby Boy is still a game. (Once you start down the path of rooting and installing ‘unapproved’ utilities, meanwhile, you are deeper in explicitly gamelike territory thanks to an extra risk-reward function: will you succeed in making your hoped-for improvements, or just brick the phone?)
It ought to be no surprise, then, if dedicated portable gaming machines are losing ground to phones – not because the games on phones are better than those on a DS or PSP (they aren’t, by a long chalk), but simply because the modern Android or iOS phone is already a game, one that costs much less upfront, and one which you will have bought anyway because, well, you need a phone. Actual videogames need to step up to rival the hypnotic experience of merely using a smartphone. In a way, for game designers, the competition is now the operating system itself.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net, or read and follow his other columns on his topic page.