Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - iPhone SDK

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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iPhone SDK - No Good for Games Yet

by Ian Bogost March 11, 2008

categories: General

Weren't you all excited about last week's announcement of the iPhone SDK? Didn't you think it would finally shut up grouchy people like me who are always complaining about the lack of open platforms?

Yeah, me too. Until I downloaded it and tried to build some sample OpenGL code. Turns out the iPhone "Aspen" simulator can't run OpenGL. Which means you need to own an actual iPhone and tether it to your Mac to do development. Great way to sell more iPhones huh? Except you can't even do that, because then you'll also need the $99 iPhone Developer Membership to actually be allowed to deploy and test on your iPhone. Meh.

This may be a bit of an overstatement, but the conclusion I come to is that the iPhone SDK isn't yet really a game development platform. Since many, perhaps most, viable iPhone games will render with OpenGL, this means ordinary folks will be stuck writing hypothetical code -- or blindly porting old OpenGL-bound C -- until Apple lets us do something more.

Surprising, I know. After all, Apple would never screw third party developers... :P

Comments (4)

Kinda reminds me of that insulting joke MS came up with.

Patrick Dugan on March 11, 2008 10:46 PM

I agree that's a pain, but a $99 (kit) + $399 (phone) investment isn't too horrible -- assuming you already have a Mac; the SDK isn't available for Windows.

I think this is very exciting news — the most performance-capable mass-market gaming platform to date! (Besides PC's themselves, I suppose.)

andrewstern on March 11, 2008 11:13 PM

Andrew, also note that you can't even spend the $99 and get the ability to do OpenGL dev right now, unless you are one of the select few chosen by Apple. That will change in time. It is possible to do 2D graphics with Core Graphics, however.

Ian Bogost on March 12, 2008 2:47 AM

I'm going to have to side with Andrew (even though I'm feeling the same headache as Ian).

On one hand yes the Apple rigamaroll is tedious, but on the other hand how can you not be excited about the potential distribution system. To me, that's the big win and is worth jumping through hoops.

How many people know how to buy something off Handango and get the .jar onto their phone? vs. How many people know how to buy something off of the iTunes Store and let OSX handle the install?

Dakota Reese on March 12, 2008 1:11 PM