This post has not been edited by the GamesBeat staff. Opinions by GamesBeat community writers do not necessarily reflect those of the staff.
Editor's note: I don't play games on a smart phone, but Chris's account of what's available doesn't give me much confidence. I also have the impression that most iPhone users wouldn't be willing to pay the higher price of the more interesting titles that Chris envisions. -Rob
In hindsight, playing Swine Flu "H1N1" The Game in my local GP's waiting room last year wasn't the best idea I've ever had.
Due to a scheduling error, I waited nearly two hours for the district nurse to remove three stitches from above my eye. To help alleviate the boredom, I started playing games on my iPhone. That's how I wound up playing this particular swine flu diversion.
It's a pretty simplistic and unimaginative variation on the hundreds of meteorite games out there; you control a hospital with a large cannon on its roof, which you use to shoot diseased pigs on parachutes before they hit the ground. A friend, who thought it was quite funny that I was one of the first people in South Wales to catch the disease, linked me to the game at the peak of the swine flu hysteria. Although it wasn't until a few months later when I was at the general practitioner's that I bothered to play.
A child — probably more bored than I — kept glancing longingly at my iPhone. He could see that a game held my attention as I focused on the screen and tapped regularly. Eventually, curiosity got the better of him, and he walked towards me, sandwiched himself between an old man and myself, and stared at my phone for a few seconds.
"Are you shooting pigs?" he asked.
"Yeah," I replied.
"Why?"
"Because that's the aim of the game."
"What game is it?"
"Swine Flu The Game," I said.
"So, do you have swine flu, then?"
Immediately, the old man and the woman on my other side shuffled away; they'd irrationally bought into the kid's leap of logic. After feeling a little sheepish, I realized that even though it was clear to me that the media had overblown the impact of the pandemic, people were still concerned about swine flu.
It made me ask: why wasn't this swine flu game satirizing that?
Instead of using the game to poke fun at the media's sensational coverage or the panic people had whipped themselves into, the developer had essentially hijacked a current event in order to make a quick and easy app with overwrought, soulless gameplay.
It wasn't the first time an iPhone developer had used a recent happening to fuel a cheap clone of something else. The collapse of the banks led to Squash the $treet, a blend of State of Emergency with classic Grand Theft Auto top-down perspective where the player goes on a rampage and kills bankers in a Wall Street full of bad puns and even worse game design.
Another one, inspired by BP's complete ineptitude regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, has players dropping objects into the sea in an attempt at plugging the leak. The cleanup of the oil spill also led to the creation of two apps that I dare call games, for they basically involve you swiping your finger across the screen to get rid of oil. They're hardly fun, and I wouldn't even classify them as a short distraction.
The one thing that the current event App Store games have in common is that they're all utterly rubbish. While I appreciate that the nature of trailing hot news means a developer has to conceptualize, develop, and release the game in a short time frame — something the App Store facilitates very well — surely someone quick-witted enough could find a better angle.
I'm obviously not expecting a hugely elaborate, deep, and engrossing experience, but App Store developers should take note that using a current event to peddle an uninspired game isn't going to make it stand out much more than the rest of the garbage it's competing with. In fact, chances are that after the event is out of the media'a narrative and people's minds, sales of the game will slump lower than the hundreds of others just like it.
Rather than appealing to populist sentiment or plainly hijacking recent news to sell a 59p/99¢ piece of shovelware, they should focus on making a game that has some sort of meaning, message, or satire about it. Something like that could be a classic.
Chris Winters is an unemployed (and unpublished) novelist and wannabe games writer. You can check out his stream of reviews from his backlog on Been There, Played That, or get in touch with him on Twitter: @akwinters.