What Does an Apple Watch Game Look Like?

It wasn't all that long ago that the release of a portable Apple product was met with questions on how email would work, what the 'cloud' was and whether you could hack into your ex's photos. Even a 'TV Out' function was a revolution. Simpler devices, simper times.

Today, amongst other less engaging interactions, we want to know what kind of games we're going to play and how they're going to work. Email, online storage and hacking? We know about that, already. How am I going to pass the time on the tube, at the office or on the toilet? That's the query the Apple Watch needs to answer to convince some that it's worth strapping £500's worth of crack-happy screen to your wrist.

Making a game for a watch is no easy task, one that has not been attempted before with any degree of success or thought. The phone is the closest comparison we presently have in this regard, and it's not difficult to see how a game successful on iPhone etc wouldn't work in the realm of the wrist strap.

For starters, you've two hands free to interact with a phone. A watch allows you only the one. The screen is also much smaller and the watch must serve that most basic of functions at all times: communicating to you the time of day. "Within such a framework, the game most fit," Yoda might say, possibly.

London-based Bossa Studios, of I Am Bread and Surgeon Simulator fame, believe that it has come up with a solution. It's called Spy Watch and it's designed to work alongside as many of the watch's default functions as possible, whilst requiring only a few seconds of interaction at the time. The idea is that you're playing the game and moving it forward in that same snapshot of time that it takes to check the time or read a text message.

Quite literally, Spy Watch attempts to turn your Apple Watch into a... well, a spy watch. The kind of thing you saw in movies from the 80s, which is perfect considering that the product's target market is likely predominantly made up of those in their 30s and will instantly recognise the neon-blue visuals as the trademark of any serious undercover outfit.

Spy Watch's core premise revolves around guiding an agent through a series of missions in order to uncover secrets about your own family, its heritage and its role in the secret service community. It's all fictional, of course, the app won't actually delve into your personal emails and messages looking for dirt that you didn't know existed.

In a way it plays like a traditional text adventure, albeit with an extremely modern spin in the form of its visuals, the nature of your interactions and how it utilises the watch's features. You make basic decisions such as which missions to engage in, how riskily you want the agent to act and what responses you're going to give when questions are asked. In turn, these influence your story and how long it takes to play out.

Bossa says that it's designed to be interacted with once every 20 minutes or so, each 'play session' lasting a few seconds. That speed is made possible thanks to Spy Watch tapping into the watch's native notifications system, with message from the game pushed to your screen in the exact same way as an email or text message. Having the game feel 'real' is a big part of the design philosophy, hence the insistence on having statements from it exist on the same plane as your daily life.

However, the game tracks the rate and times that you interact with it and alters the pace of play as a result. If you stop playing it for a while then it will send you less messages. If you never play between midnight and 7am, sleep time, then it will pick up on that and not send you messages at that time of day. Alternatively, if you perform actions constantly it will increase the messages to you and ask for more input from you.

It's tempting to think of it a piece of interactive fiction simultaneously inspired by the worlds of 80s spy gadgetry and Tamagotchis... without the risk of digital death attached or the constantly worrying that the latter has just shit itself.

Whatever the case, it's a new way of thinking about game design and a new way of playing. That is exactly what a brand new device like the Apple Watch needs to succeed as a respected gaming platform. The fewer lazily reproduced iPhone games that populate its screen the better the results are going to be for both developer and user.

For any Apple Watch game, the key is going to rest in working out the means of interaction and the timing of them to fit the typical uses and applications of a watch. As Bossa has already shown an understanding of, a watch is not a phone and it has not been designed to be stared for long periods. If a phone is designed to grab the attention for a few minutes at a time, a watch is designed to hold your gaze for seconds.

Playing a game through the mechanisms that you're going naturally going to be focused on for these seconds seems like a logical step in the right direction and it's heartening to see a studio tap into that idea so quickly, ready for the device's launch. Fingers crossed that other studios, with more time to understand the Apple Watch and see it used by real people in practical situations, come to similarly unobtrusive design conclusions.