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Could the Apple Watch become one of gaming's Galapagos Islands?

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  • Could the Apple Watch become one of gaming's Galapagos Islands?

    I am not sure about the Apple Watch - which, when a single object costs as much as this does, means that I am sure that I am not going to buy one any time soon. Early reviews suggest that this a device you need to actually create a new gap in your life for: you must find a way to love the various strange things it is good at, and forgive all the things it's not so brilliant with. Go deeper and things get weird. The Apple Watch protects you from the tyranny of your own phone, apparently. That is nice to hear. Maybe something will come along in a few years that will protect you from the tyranny of your own watch, too. Maybe your phone and your watch will start to gang up on you. Maybe a turf war will race all the way from your pocket and up your arm, headed for the ear where Apple products will start to crawl inside your head and clamp painlessly onto your limbic system.
    That said, as soon as anyone I know does buy an Apple Watch, I'm going to want to have a bit of a play around with it. There's this new kind of haptic feedback that feels more like a tap than a buzz, apparently. That sounds fun. Also, I want to see how my enormously fat fingers interact with a screen of that size. The thing I am most intrigued by - excited is too strong a word - is games, though. I love it when games travel to places that seem uniquely unsuited to them. Sure, you get a lot of dross, a lot of botches, but you also get to see designers at their best: wrangling with strange, seemingly intractable platforms in a bid to make new kinds of fun. Like those horizontal willow trees quietly growing along the ground in islands situated above the arctic circle, it is great to see games flourish where games are clearly not meant to be.
    And initial Apple Watch games seem quietly interesting. Spy_Watch is probably the one to keep an eye on, a Bossa Studios title that the team's referring to as a 'background game'. That terminology doesn't seem enormously promising, but it seems to mean that we may be about to see a spate of games that muddle around with perspective and player role a little bit. You're not the spy in Spy_Watch, you're the spymaster, dispatching your agent across the globe and then waiting, in real-time, for messages to come back. What should I do in this situation, boss? Here are my options. This is a clever way of doling out a little light gameplay in five second parcels, and it's a nice reminder that games generally make you the star, and yet there are plenty of other positions available.
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