Can Apple crack gamers?

My name is Matthew and I am an addict. I have been playing the iOS game My Singing Monsters now for... as long as I can remember. It’s like there’s nothing else in my life anymore. I have come to understand what it must be like to be CEO of Apple.

You see, when you first start up My Singing Monsters, you have only a few monsters and only a few things you can feed them. As you feed them, they get bigger and need to be fed more things. Then you get more monsters, and they need to be fed different things. At first it’s all apples. Then it’s apple sauce, then apple juice, then apple ice pops (which you make in an oven for some reason. Hey, I didn’t write the game). Then coconuts. Then bamboo. Lemons. Logs. Slime, whatever that is. And it gets worse.

The more monsters you have to feed, the more complex become the things they demand. And as soon as you’ve fed one of your monsters, it immediately demands to be fed again, with something more interesting this time.

The game is actually quite a lot of fun, figuring out the most efficient way to deploy your various resources for growing and manufacturing various foodstuffs in order to satisfy the insatiable demands of your monsters. But it’s also horrifying. It consumes your (my) every waking moment.

I now understand why Steve Jobs wore the same outfit every day, and why Tim Cook has taken to doing it, too. How can you possibly have time to decide what to wear when you have a Pom-Pom who needs coconut cheese? (Yeah, that’s an actual thing.)

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was simplify the dizzying array of products it was manufacturing and supplying. No more printers, no more cameras, no more Newtons and so forth. Just Macs. And he vastly simplified the range of Macs that was available, too. All of this was the right thing to do, at least in part because at that time Apple had very few monsters to feed.

In the years hence, however, Apple has gotten a lot more monsters to feed. And it feeds them Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPods. And they’ve levelled up, so they want watches now (sort of). And they want TVs (sort of) and cars (maybe).

One area Apple did not expect to be getting into is gaming, but it’s been dragged there kicking and screaming. Steve Jobs sounded as surprised as anyone else a couple of years after the launch of the iPhone, when he announced that it had become the most popular mobile gaming platform according to some measure or other. That had not been part of the plan. Apple almost went into gaming once before, when it partnered with Bandai to produce a box known as Pippin. The project died before it got off the ground and became part of Apple legend — the kind of thing veteran commentators mention from time to time when they want to remind you that they’re veteran commentators.

Now, Apple has a prime opportunity to make inroads into gaming, thanks to iOS and its infuriatingly addictive things like My Singing Monsters. iOS developers — never having paid much attention to what Apple wants its devices to be able to do — had already started experimenting with ways to incorporate the big screen experience into their games via Apple TV before Apple threw up its hands and actually supported them with the fourth generation of the device.

So now Apple really is in the gaming business, whether it wants to be there or not. There are more monsters there — different monsters — and their demands are insatiable. Even when they’re satisfied, they will demand more. Gamers are not like the customers Apple has had before, and I’ll be intrigued to see whether it figures out how to deal with them or not. They’re not like the high-fashion and prestige retail customers Apple seems to be gearing itself towards if recent hires are anything to go by.

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, my Mammot was asking for lemon cake, and it should be just about done. 

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order.