Commentary

Is Apple Planning A Charge Into The Video Game Console Space?

Steve Jobs may be a "super-genius" of marketing and design but I don't think he saw at least one media behemoth coming -- video gaming. Jobs and Apple seemed almost surprised at the ways in which the iPhone so quickly became the new locus of mobile gaming. While they were screwing around with Apple TV, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony had already recognized that gaming was the best way to get a set top box into the living room. We are still waiting for Apple to release for iOS4 the centralized gaming center that will facilitate multiplayer gaming on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

For all of its many missteps, even Nokia understood the power of gaming done right when it tried a similar service long before its time had come in the mid 2000s. For the longest time the Macs had a terrible games library. When I suggested a Mac Book to my daughter as a replacement for her dead Dell, her first question was whether she could play The Sims on it. For all of its foresight, I am not sure Apple ever quite got that gaming is to this generation what music was to mine -- a defining medium. There have been rumors around Apple eying the games market for many years, and little came of it until the iPhone and the apps market made the truth of the matter unavoidable. Games matter on every media platform they touch.

apple mock gamingNow the company is starting to make their investment and perhaps re-thinking just how powerful gaming is in modern media. A great scoop at AppleInsider this week suggests that Apple is looking at gaming from a unique angle. A patent application from the Wizards of Cupertino shows a system of converting a player's videogame experience into a comic book-like format. The application OS for "Automatically Generating a Book Describing a User's Videogame" promises to convert the unique avatars, dialogue and gameplay decisions a player makes in their own journey through a video game.

As with the best new digital ideas, Apple is riffing off of something gamers themselves have been doing all along. YouTube is brimming with homemade gameplay recordings and amateur video walkthroughs of games. I know a teenage boy who considers watching the video walkthrough of Mario Brothers games a form of entertainment in itself. Get me stoned enough and I might think so, too.

AppleInsider speculates that the next iteration of AppleTV may be Apple's back door entry into living room gaming. If, as rumors persist, the next model runs iOS 4 then we should be able to play iPhone/iPad apps from the App Store on the big screen. The prospect of apps on the TV raises a host of questions about translating the touch interface to a controller of some sort, or course.

But Apple's patent application makes mention of other consoles and even uses the Xbox 360 role-playing game Mass Effect 2 as an example. Apple may be aiming for an even larger gaming presence that transcends the AppleTV itself. Is there room for one more big brand battling for the living room now that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are already into their second and third generation game consoles? Or more? Keep in mind that Google TV is coming as well and that company seems to be planning a major foray into app-based social gaming that could port to TVs easily.

As the Web migrates into living rooms, the gaming game could change just as surely as the video game surely will. The gladiators are assembling.

apple gaming patent app

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