作者：Tadhg Kelly

有一段时间我一直认为智能手表将成为下一个重要的平台。我一直在幻想一些不断出现的用例（主要是关于游戏），并且这看起来真的很有趣。然而在某一天我突然想起自己拥有一个Pebble，尽管它是基于一种简单的方式，但仍带有一些局限性。之后我意识到自己很少会佩戴它或留意它的应用。

Pebble(from edu-hb)

我很好奇是否所有的智能手表都会收到追捧，并且我发现它的根本理能够吸引人们的注意。我并不是唯一带有这种想法的人。游戏设计师Will Luton认为智能手表的发展可能会赶超手机。他认为这是环境游戏和流行游戏的理想场所，其显著的设计让这些游戏能够像早前Facebook上的简单游戏一样呈现出来。

这是否是个真实空间，或者只是一件短暂的事物？游戏玩法是否真的很快就会出现在你的手腕上？

明显性

比起PC，手机，平板电脑和平板手机让我们离屏幕更近，并且这些设备上所出现的应用数量可是不计其数。我们根本就不能想象如果有一天我们口袋里的设备不再具有交流，地图，电子邮件和追踪器等等应用时会是什么情况。然而比起这些设备，可佩带式设备的最大家分店便是其明显性。关于手机，你还需要从口袋中将其掏出才能进行核实，但是可佩带式设备却始终都存在于你的视线中。

为了进一步推动这种明显性，我们就需要从眼球和手腕着手。最早出现的是谷歌眼镜，但这似乎是个不完整的理念。《每日秀》的短剧向我们做出了解释：谷歌眼镜太招摇了。如此看来手腕将是更好的选择—-也就是智能手表。这仍然处于人们的视线中，并且能够带给你震动感，同时还能运行像地图等应用，并且不会吓到别人。

从游戏视角来看，这直接引出了地理寻宝游戏。通常情况下，你将从游戏活动中得知一款游戏并进行尝试，反过来这也能够为所有人更新一款全局游戏。也许你会为了更丰富的体验选择在之后进入一款手机或网页应用，但智能手表能够提供给你身在其中的游戏感。举个例子来说，智能手表的使用者会因为前往某个特定场所，留下评论或解答谜题而获得点数。

另外一个游戏优势便是其适应度和行动追踪功能。这在手机领域已经非常受欢迎了，但是它们更倾向于依赖定制硬件（如Up）或人工输入。相反地，智能手表消除了更多输入元素而用被动传感器取代了它。这听起来可能有点过时，但这就像是一款使用智能手表中的被动血糖追踪仪器的“糖尿病”游戏，而这么做只是为了拯救一些生命而已。

第三种优势便是基于环境的交流。例如，你的智能手表将会在所处区域遇到另外一个智能手表。它们可以进入一个游戏般的交流环境，甚至还能战斗，交易，或者打情骂俏。

界面

Pebble并不支持触屏，但似乎大多数下一代的智能手表都会支持触屏。屏幕将变得足够大，从而让用户能够进行轻敲，滑动，按压以及摇曳等行动。似乎智能手表是不可能呈现软键盘，但它们应该能够通过声音进行实现（游戏邦注：例如大多数人期待苹果的iWatch具有Siri功能）。再一次地，我们也可以期待它们将支持指南，倾斜以及其它传感器。

从根本上来看这提供了某种形式的互动。这样的互动可能是建立在一只手上（因为用户将手表佩戴在另一支手上），但他们并不是搅局者。另外，智能手表上的游戏将遭遇比智能手机上的游戏更多拇指或手指阻挡问题，但再一次地，这也能够得到巧妙解决。

智能手表可能是最缺少行动游戏的平台，甚至没有《Flappy Bird》，但你将能够在此看到一些更棒的游戏版本，如《Threes》，或其它包含简单轻敲或摇曳动作的游戏。角色扮演游戏或照顾类游戏也适合这一平台。智能手表将是电子宠物互动和包含时间以及类似元素的游戏的最理想平台。例如孵蛋类游戏。你将在手表中饲养一只小生物，也许其中还包含解决谜题等体验，你还能够与其它生物进行联系，也许它们之间还能够交换DNA并不断进化。

尽管屏幕大小可能会阻碍智能手表游戏作为具有沉浸感，休闲，且让人愉快的游戏，但是它们却可能获得重新定义。这便是智能手表的优势所在。

大转折

然而还存在一些问题。一大问题便是通知信息很烦人。尽管手机已经将通知带进了我们的生活中，但这总是能成为我们发脾气的根源，而智能手表有可能将这一问题变得更严重。当我在使用Pebble时，一开始可能还没有多大感受，但渐渐地我会开始烦躁，然后变得非常生气。于是我便选择将其彻底关掉。

而这也意味着我关掉了它的明显性，并将其变成一个哑巴手表。毫无疑问这是一种恶性循环，但问题在于开发者经常会滥用通知，并发送一些没有个性或毫无相关的借口，也就是将其变成广告般的存在。如此便连累了那些使用这类型技术的用户，特别是对于高级用户来说。对于许多用户来说，当接收到通知时手机哔哔直叫真的是件很烦的事，而如果这种反应是来自手腕的话你会怎么想？

我们可以考虑力度。大小限制了智能手表中可以设置的内容，但同时也没有人想要一块覆盖了整个前臂的手表。用户想要的是小型，且时髦的手表。所以基于如此小的游戏空间，创造一款全能的智能手表是不可能的。大部分手表的内部结构都属于电池。交流将可能局限于蓝牙，无线和NFC。传感器将被微型化，然后电子技术将支持屏幕。

这便引出了我的最大担忧：对手机的依赖。现在，智能手表似乎还不是一个独立的平台，相反地，它仍是作为手机的附属物。从本质上来看它就像是主要核心内容的第二个显示屏，而不是一个完全独立的平台。

对此存在一些合理的理由，然而事实上，智能手表作为一种外围设备将大大削减了其市场规模，并且可能被当成一种周边配件。这反过来也意味着智能手表将面临严重的群聚效应。如此它的普及性也会被大大削弱。

StreetPass便是关于普适技术的一个例子。它能够识别出周边的另外一台3DS，并引导它们之间进行较小的游戏互动，但问题在于这种情况的出现频率非常低。同样的问题也出现在了基于位置的游戏中，这也是为何FourSquare会停顿的原因。

我也很担心智能手表会变成相互独立的个体。让我们想想有许多人已经通过手机制造商购买了智能手表，但它们却不能进行互动。尽管Android Wear推动着它们，但你可以想象如果自己仍需要拥有三星手表才能够与三星手机进行互动，仍需要亚马逊手表才能够与亚马逊手机进行互动，并且仍需要Windows手表才能够与Windows手机进行互动会是怎样的情况。如此智能手表将变成一组分支平台的组成部分，即它将作为一种特色手表而不再是智能手表。如此开发者也就没有理由去支持它们，最终将只会创造出一些最低标准的应用。

结论

对于我来说，这里存在一个空间，并且将会出现一些游戏去填补这一空间，并不是所有内容都能够作用于一个2英寸的屏幕上，但也并不是所有内容都必须适应于此。任何成功平台的优势很少是关于百分百的适用，相反地，利用其独特性而为用户创造更棒的生活更加重要。

同时，根据我们今天的理解，人们似乎还太轻视智能手表。现在的它就像很久以前的掌上电脑，那时候的掌上电脑一直在寻找突破，并且最终它们花了10年的时间才取得现在的成绩。到目前为止我看到的所有智能手表都带给了我这种感觉，也就是现在的它们还不够强大。

毫无疑问，所有人都在期待着苹果会做些什么。它们是否会采取与智能手机相同的方式去定义智能手表，或者只是将其当成一种附属产品？不过在关注着苹果的同时，我们也可以从自己身上寻找答案。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转功，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

How Real Will Wearable Games Be?

by Tadhg Kelly

I keep flip-flopping on smartwatches. Some days I think they’re the coming thing, the next big platform and so on. I imagine the use cases of constantly-on (especially for games) and it seems exciting. However on other days I remember that I have a Pebble, and while it’s neat in its way it does have some heavy limitations. After a brief flirtation I realized that I was barely wearing it or caring about its apps.

I find myself wondering whether all smartwatches will be similarly faddy, and yet find the root idea compelling. I’m not the only one. Game designer Will Luton thinks smartwatches could be bigger than mobile, for example. As he sees it they’re ideally placed for ambient and pervasive games, with the most obvious designs for them behaving similarly to the lite games of the early days of Facebook.

Is it a real space though, or is it just a passing thing? Is gameplay really coming to a wrist near you soon?

Pervasiveness

Mobile, tablets and phablets have all brought us closer to the screen than PCs ever could, and the number of applications that this has already enabled is insane. It’s almost impossible to imagine a time when we didn’t have communications, maps, email, trackers so on all in our pockets. The biggest plus-point for wearables over and above those devices is essentially even more pervasiveness. A mobile you still have to fish out of your pocket to check in, but a wearable is essentially always in view.

The push for more pervasiveness led to the eyeball and the wrist. The first is Google Glass, but it’s increasingly looking like a broken idea. This Daily Show skit nails why: Glass is simply too invasive. The wrist looks to be the better bet, and on it the smartwatch. It’s still in view, can ping you with vibrations or run apps like maps, yet doesn’t scare other people.

From a gaming standpoint this intuitively leads to Geocaching-style games. The general idea is that you’re notified of a game event and engage with it in a single tap, which in turns updates a global game for everyone. Maybe you check into a mobile or Web app later for a richer experience, but the smartwatch provides the in-the-moment play. So for example the smartwatch explorer earns points for traveling to certain places, tagging or leaving comments, or going on puzzle hunts.

Another gaming use is in fitness and activity-tracking. These are already very popular in the mobile space but they tend to rely on custom hardware (like the Up) or manual input. A smartwatch, on the other hand, potentially takes much of the input factor away and replaces it with passive sensors. It may sound a little corny, but a global diabetes game using a passive blood-sugar tracking built into a smartwatch might be just the thing to help save some lives.

The third use is in ambient communication. Say, for example, that your smartwatch encounters another in its locale. They could engage in a gamelike communication with each other (similar to Nintendo’s StreetPass), perhaps combating, trading or simply flirting/pinging one another.

Interface

The Pebble isn’t touch-enabled, but it seems fair to assume that most next-generation smartwatches will be. The screens should be big enough to interpret taps, swipes, pinches and maybe even drags. It seems unlikely that they’ll be able to display soft keyboards, but likely that they’ll handle voice at least passably well (for example most people expect Apple’s iWatch to connect to Siri). And again it’s fair to assume that they’ll support compass, tilt and other sensors.

At a basic level this offers a fair range of interaction. Such interactions really would have to be built with one hand in mind (because of course the user is wearing the watch on their other hand) but they wouldn’t be showstoppers. Another is that the smartwatch game would have even more thumb or finger-occluding issues than smartphones (where using your digit covers over a part of the screen) but again, that could be smartly handled.

The smartwatch will likely be poor as a platform for action gaming, even Flappy Bird, but you might see great versions of games like Threes working on it for instance, or other games that involve simple tapping or dragging. Roleplaying or caring games would work very well. Smartwatches are ideal for Tamagotchi-style interactions, for games that involve time elements and similar. One example idea (combining this and pervasiveness) is the evolving-egg style of game. You have a small creature on your watch that you feed and grow, perhaps solving puzzles as a part of that experience, and as it comes into contact with other creatures perhaps they swap some DNA and evolve.

While the screen size likely prevents smartwatch games from ever being immersive, ultra-casual, connected, lighthearted gaming fare could definitely find a new home on it. That’s where smartwatch’s strength likely lies.

The Big Buts

Yet there are problems. A big one, for example, is that notifications are actually pretty annoying. While the mobile phone has brought notifications into our lives in a big way, they are a constant source of grump for many of us, and smartwatches threaten to make that grump even worse. I can only speak for myself but when I used my Pebble a lot I thought it was very cool to be pinged like this for about a day. Then less so, then annoying, then irritating as hell. Then I gave up trying to tailor them and turned them off wholesale.

And that means I essentially turned off its pervasiveness and reduced it to a much dumber watch, which I then tired of. It’s a vicious circle to be sure, but the problem is that developers often abuse notifications, sending them out with very little personal or relevant pretext and essentially turning them into advertisements. Even relatively innocent uses of that kind of technology start to become a drag, especially for power users. It’s bad enough for many users that their phone buzzes and pings when notifications come in, but on the wrist?

Then there’s the straightforward concerns with power. Size imposes a large technical constraint on what can be packed into smartwatches, but at the same time nobody wants a watch that covers their forearm like a Leela-style Futurama communicator. They want small, sleek and stylish – that is if they want watches at all. So with only so much room to play with, it’s impractical to create a smartwatch too capable. Most of the watch’s innards will be battery. Communications will likely be restricted to Bluetooth, WiFi and NFC. Sensors will have to be extremely miniaturized, and then there’s the electronics to support the screen.

That leads to my biggest concern: the dependency on mobile. Currently smartwatches do not really seem to be being thought of as stand-alone platforms, but rather as adjuncts to phones. They are essentially a secondary display to a primary core, not so much a platform in their own right as a peripheral to another.

There are good reasons why, yet the fact that smartwatches are peripheral devices massively cuts down the likely size of their market as they grow to be regarded as peripheral accessories. Nice-to-have for the pres-existing device, a luxury’s luxury, but not serious. That in turn means that smartwatches face critical mass issues. Without it pervasiveness is seriously cut down.

StreetPass is an example of a pervasive technology that works but doesn’t. It detects when another 3DS is in the same vicinity and conducts a minor gaming interaction between them, but the problem is that the frequency of that meeting happening is low. It needs scale and without it is nothing. The exact same problem applied to location-based gaming, which is why FourSquare ground to a halt, and also to smartwatches.

I’m fearful that even if smartwatches do get their start that they will already be balkanized. Imagine, if you will, a scenario where many people have smartwatches from mobile manufacturers, but they’re not interoperable. Even with Android Wear powering them, imagine you still need to get the Samsung watch to work with the Samsung phone, the Amazon watch to work with Amazon phone, the Windows watch to work with the Windows phone. Smartwatch then becomes a recipe for a set of sub-platforms, in effect feature watches rather than smartwatches. Developers then see no reason to offer them major support, resulting in lowest-common-denominator apps.

Conclusion

So you see why I’m flip flopping. It feels, to me at least, like there is a space there and some kinds of game that would well fill that space. Not everything would work on a two-inch screen, but then again not everything has to. The strength of any successful platform is rarely about being all things to all people, but rather leveraging its uniqueness in ways that make peoples’ lives better.

Yet at the same time the smartwatch as we understand it today seems too tied down, too belittled, for it to truly flourish. It feels much like the palmtop sector of yore, where lots of mini-solutions tried to find their way but couldn’t, and ultimately the idea took a decade longer to bear fruit than it should have. So far all the versions of the smartwatch that I’ve seen have that feel, and it’s not strong enough to be considered “next” yet.

All eyes are no doubt turning to Apple to see what the company will do. Will it define smartwatch for real much as it did smartphone, or will it go the accessory road? As goes Apple, so go the rest of us.(source:techcrunch)