Apple Watch Gaming Hack Hints At Unique Platform Potential

Sifting through the lull and general paucity of quality Apple Watch news, I came across something truly interesting:

It seems that the crafty folks at Facebook’s Tel Aviv office put together the above as an experiment, and the result, while laughably impractical and unwieldy (for both coders and players alike, per the developer’s comments at the source), foreshadows real potential for single and double-finger tri-dimensional gaming on our tiniest screens.

Right now, Apple Watch gaming is relegated to animated images instead of onboard, real-time graphical processing. However, in the future, games actually rendered on the fly at the wrist will be a thing, and while this Doom port’s on-screen control mechanism is basically unusable, I can image 3D realms (but not Duke Nukem) being navigated via the Digital Crown — or whatever that evolves into — in later hardware revisions. As with my RC driving concept, spinning the Crown up would turn you to the right and rolling it down would turn you to the left. Other actions could be gestural, and even though complex games with simultaneous navigation and shooting and so on may not ever really work here, maze and puzzle games would fit in just fine.

Even (especially?) racing games have great potential, with auto-acceleration and Crown steering. Depending on your Apple Watch orientation, you could use your index finger or middle finger to turn, while its neighboring digit could tap lightly to initiate drift or press harder to slam on the brakes. And such a control layout would lend itself to a whole lot more than the aforementioned genres — they’d just have to be streamlined sufficiently. Sports games? Man alive! Maybe you could spin the Crown hard to heave a long bomb or swing for the fences or shoot a half-court buzzer beater. Force Touch to break tackles or bunt or slam dunk. And golf seems like a no-brainer. The opportunities here really are endless, and these examples are just scratching the surface.

I dont know about you, but I really think this could work. I think I finally talked myself into believing in actual, real (micro)gaming on Apple Watch.

Cool.