Games, Games and more Games

Games, it turns out, are great predictors for the way new technology will be used.

When I was in college in the late ’70s, (shocking but true), we had a ‘Computer Center’ that had a massive IBM mainframe.  You had to make a long tray full of IBM punchcards and then ‘run your program’.  You sat in front of a massive teletext keyboard. the machine had a printer with a roll of paper about two inches wide.  The whole room rattled and the machine printed out “READY?”. Than you typed in ‘RUN’ and again, the whole room rattled as the machine processed the program.

Meanwhile, down at the Purple Cow pub, there was a new kind of pinball. It was called Pong. It was more like a TV set and you and a friend played this kind of ping-pong game.  That was also a computer, although we never saw it that way – and one that would eventually come to replace the giant IBM mainframe that shook the whole Bronfman Science Center.

That green screen down there at the pub was the future.

Once we had massive desktop computers and towers and then even laptops.  But along came iPhones.

Once we had incredibly complex games with movie-like special effects and the need to buy an xbox or game controllers to play.

Those days are over.

Zynga, which makes the simplest, most graphic free games in the world, or Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds (valued at $2.25 billion), are to the gaming world what Pong was to the computer world – simple and incrediblyl popular.

The game-chager was the iPhone.

The iPhone was in everyone’s pocket.

Suddenly, there was no need to buy an x-box.  Who even wanted one?

6 billion people in the world had not only bought the game platform, they kept it with them pretty much 24 hours a day.  Who did that with an X-box or a Game Boy?

When new technologies appear, most people and companies take the new technology and jam it into the old ways of working.  The first games for phones weren’t made for phones, they were made for computers and made to appear on phones.  Remember snake?

Then, along came a generation of games that were directly derivative of what phones could do – small screens, fast, hand-held, simple and addictive.

In 2010 Zynga had profits of $400  million. That’s more than Facebook. Clearly they had discovered something.

What they discovered was what we might call the ‘grammar’ of mobile interaction.

Now, as with Pong in 1977, do we have the intelligence to look at this new manifestation and apply it across the boards to other Internet based applications?

Are iPhones the ‘game changer’ that Pong and CTR screen based ‘computing’ were? I think so. I think what makes this so powerful is that everyone already owns the platform. You don’t have to go out and buy an X-box. You don’t have to go out and buy a laptop – or even turn it on.  It’s with you all the time. So, yes, I think that like Mainframes in 1977, desktops and laptops are probably dead.  And if its going to be all iPhone all the time, then the architecture of our content has to start to reflect what iPhones (and other smart phones) do best – which is small screen, simple and fast.

And – and this is the most interesting AND – what we do with phones is communicate both ways. We talk, we text.  When it comes to video, why would we just watch?