Apple Is One Rule Away From Ruling Console Gaming

Apple is very, very close to being able to just about kill off Ninendo and Sony's gaming console businesses and perhaps Microsoft's too if the media features of the Xbox One don't work as well as advertised. Only one very Apple-y rule will keep it from doing so.

Let's start with something that leaked a while ago (I'm going off the leak so I don't break the Apple Developer NDA). iOS 7 will support game controllers. Some legit images leaked out a while back, so you can see what they're planning. There are going to be three kinds of controllers. One cradles phone-sized iOS devices and has a limited button set: ABXY, two shoulders, a D-pad, and pause. The next cradles a phone-sized device and adds two analog sticks and two more shoulder buttons. The third kind is standalone (the diagram of which appears to have been inspired by the Wii Classic Controller), and it has the same, larger button set as the second one. The standalone controller image shows that up to four controllers can be used at once.

The implications for single-use handheld gaming devices are dire. The Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita can provide a much wider variety of gaming options than touchscreen phones and tablets can thanks to having buttons. With these cradle controllers, now iOS devices can provide those experiences too on top of everything else they do. Well, they would if not for that rule I mentioned. But that's not all.

Thanks to AirPlay, you will be able to play a traditional controller-based game on iOS while sitting on your couch with the video on the TV. In fact, this setup is like the Wii U, only reversed. The Wii U has a smart box hooked up to the TV with a dumb tablet you hold in your hand:

Whereas Apple's setup has a smart tablet in your hand that connects to a dumb box hooked up to the TV:

The killer aspect for Apple is pricing. The Wii U, even after its upcoming discount, will go for $299, and it's the least expensive console of the new generation. A lot of people will already have iOS devices, or at least they can justify getting one because they can use it for far more than just games. A person who has an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad can buy into Apple's living room gaming setup for a $99 AppleTV and whatever one controller costs. Even if it's $35 or $40 like a traditional console controller, the combined price still less than half of the Wii U.

There is an immense advantage to buying into this kind of gaming setup. The hardware on iOS devices gets revised about every year. You won't have to wait six to eight years for the Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft to provide updated specs. Plus, the App Store model makes it far easier for games to get to you and opens up the door for a wealth of third party developers who might never get something on a Wii U, Xbox, or PlayStation due to their barriers. And, again, the console part of it would be "free" to someone already committed to buying iDevices every couple of years anyway for their multitude of non-gaming functions.

Now, the red flag. The fact that there are two different button sets is a bit worrisome for fragmentation reasons, but that's not it. It's that Apple has made a rule that says controllers must be optional. An iOS game must be designed for touch and motion first with the controller only being a bonus add-on.

I know why Apple did this. It's to maintain simplicity for the store. It's also to remove a potential support headache. Apple doesn't want people calling them up asking for refunds when they buy a game and they find out they have to buy a controller in order to play it. Having a game in the App Store that requires a controller just wouldn't do at all.

It also means that Apple won't kill off the other game console makers as quickly as it could have. Think about some traditional handheld or living room console titles, anywhere from Zelda to Smash Bros. to Madden to Halo. They require a boatload of buttons for a reason. Making a game that functions well both with the limitations of touch input and the freedom of buttons is going to be tough, and the categories of games that require controllers will still not be feasible to provide for iOS.

Apple should know this. It knows well the difference between touch input and bucket-o-buttons input. It's why it keeps iOS and OS X separate. Any gamer can tell you that this rule is a bad idea, and people inside Apple should be able to tell you that too.

As far as the living room goes, this strategy makes total sense for Apple. It can make a limited play for living room gaming while not disrupting its plans for the AppleTV. It doesn't have to turn the AppleTV into a full fledged gaming console on top of everything else; an iDevice, a controller, and AirPlay will cover that use case just fine. It can keep selling $99 hockey pucks to people who have no interest in gaming, which makes far more sense as a living room strategy than Microsoft's apparent gambit of wanting to sell $500 Xbox Ones to people who don't play games.

Between controller support and Sprite Kit in iOS 7 and Mavericks, Apple is making a real effort at competing in games this fall. This one rule that controllers must be optional keeps it from being able to take over everything. Between apps that run on either iPhones or iPads but not both and iBooks Author creations that only work on iPads, Apple already has things in its stores that don't work everywhere. I would have thought that a simple modal dialog box saying something like "This game requires a separate controller. Do you want to buy?" might be enough to allow them to have apps that require controllers, but the powers that be chose not to go that route.

As long as that rule exists, there still is room for dedicated gaming hardware. We'll see how long that rule lasts.

A Few Good Years Have Passed

Last night, my wife and I watched the 1992 classic A Few Good Men. I was of course familiar with the famous courtroom scenes, but it's actually the first time I had seen it all the way through. My wife hadn't seen it either, but she is in the Navy now, so I figured she'd enjoy it for that reason. Her favorite line actually didn't end up being any of the famous ones. Rather, it was Kevin Pollack's Lieutenant Weinberg wryly stating that, "No one likes the whites". This is true; no one she knows likes the Navy's dress white uniforms. It had some inaccuracies that bugged her though, not the least being Tom Cruise's Lieutenant Kaffee treating Demi Moore's Lieutenant Commander Galloway as though he outranked her throughout.

Anyway, I had recorded it off of AMC, and it had little fact boxes popping up at the bottom periodically. It wasn't until one of those boxes appeared some time into it that it really clicked for me why Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup was so intense about being on the wall and so forth. He was the leader at the Guantanamo Bay base, and at the time that Aaron Sorkin wrote the play on which the movie was based, the Cold War was still going on. Not that Cuba is the United States' friend now or anything, but the implications of the island being Communist were far more important then than now.

I was born three years before Sorkin's play first hit the stage. I can remember old maps from elementary school that said USSR and can recall seeing fallout shelter signage here and there, but I have no recollection of the Cold War and its existential threat to the US. I was four when the Berlin Wall fell; I was six when the Soviet Union dissolved. Even if I had learned about Russian nukes being pointed at my country at the time, I wasn't old enough to really understand the implications.

For my generation, Guantanamo Bay has a very different connotation. It's not an outpost of democracy on the edge of Communist territory; it's a holding cell for War on Terror suspects. The incident that started everything for the plot in A Few Good Men was a Marine shooting a single bullet outward across the fence unprovoked. While that's never something you want to see happen, it probably would be more or less a nonevent these days beyond whatever punishment a Marine gets for unnecessarily discharging a weapon. It wouldn't be an event that could potentially cost lives. Cuba isn't a battlefield anymore. Guantanamo is a very different part of the wall that keeps America safe now.

The climactic scene with Kaffee haranguing Jessup on the stand is still as intense as ever, but it has lost a little something because of the way the film takes for granted that the audience understands the Cold War subtext of the film. I am pretty well versed in history and probably would have put it all together eventually, but it's not something that people in the Millennial generation and beyond will get instinctively. I certainly understand it in an intellectual sense, but I don't feel it viscerally. A young person could make it through the whole thing and think that Jessup is just really cranky because he thinks every member of the military who isn't in an office in D.C. plays a part in guarding the wall that protects the homeland. The latent yet very specific threat of nuclear war will be lost in that scenario.

If Hollywood ever decides to remake this film, it will definitely hammer (probably excessively so) on that element of it during the first couple of acts. The future Jessup will throw around terms like "the Red Menace" to make sure it's clear (crystal, even) that the stakes here are related to the Cold War. For him and his generation, "Cuba" probably primarily conjures feelings surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Bay of Pigs; for me, it conjures Elian Gonzalez well before any of JFK's incidents down there. It's still a really good movie if you don't have that in the forefront of your mind, but it's not as good as it can be without it.

One of the other popup fact boxes said that Rob Reiner had hoped to make A Few Good Men be a timeless movie and that, aside from Cruise's civilian wardrobe, it is. We must add one other caveat besides loud shirts: it's timeless except for its inherent assumption that Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will always have Cold War connotations for its audience. It certainly does not for most anyone younger than 30, and it might not for those older than that anymore either given its prominence in the last decade's news cycle.

To watch A Few Good Men again: