18.Nov.2010 | Matthew Cavnar
Progress, Then Perfection
Publishing iPad apps is a great excuse to indulge your geeky heart in the name of market research—the Games category in iPad is the competitive landscape, right? So I had to pick up id’s Rage HD the day it came out. If an on-rails shooter about blasting mutants can take the #1 overall spot in iPad apps, what does it say about the business, the marketplace and the consumer?
After playing Rage, I’m guessing it means we iPad consumers have a lot in common. We want an immersive, wowser iPad experience. We want a quick fix and a lit up screen—and lots of gibs. Does that mean the iPad’s a gaming vehicle? Not really. We’ve tried all the best iPad games but we’ve still logged 10x the hours in our iPad Kindle App, reading great books. Games will always sell a lot on the iPad, but to us that’s less about games, more about how quickly they serve the strengths of the device. A game like Rage or Angry Birds isn’t escapist so much as erase-ist. You start the game. You look up. An hour’s passed. They eliminate time. But books can do the same thing. I’ve ripped through Patrick Ness’s “Chaos Walking Trilogy” (same went for Freedom) because it is so well written you can’t stop flipping the pages on your Amazon Kindle. Books compete just fine in the digital space—as long as they’re good. And enhanced books have to be even better, because they’re strutting their stuff against scary monsters in Rage.
An app is successful in so far as the user can’t stop using it and wants to come back. And there is a lesson here for book publishers. Users aren’t looking for the exactly formatted, perfectly laid out, absolutely precise piece of media. In Book Apps, they’re looking for something that’s more in line with the gaming space, something that’s got its wonky elements, that might even crash (Comixoloy keeps crashing, but I always come back to it) but that still deliver an out of time, out of space experience. If that attention getting element is in place, if it looks good and feels good, much can and will be forgiven. Call of Duty: Black Ops is one of the biggest selling media properties of recent times—and yet the bugs are mentioned on the game blogs as much as the game mechanics. Gamers are demanding, but there’s still a lesson here—digital products aren’t stuck in time, they’re living and breathing, they grow up in front of you and you make them grow up in front of you. But if you try to create something that’s going to emerge fully grown you’re going to get a stunted mutant out of Rage.
And on Rage, I remember when Doom first came out reading a preview of the game in a PC computer magazine where they described how John Romero played with a mouse and how unusual that was. These days, no one would play a first person shooter without a mouse. But can someone write a similar article where Romero shows us how to play an iPad game the right way? Because that would help with these mutants.
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