I've always been slightly surprised that Apple Watch gaming has never become a thing. What about a game that uses real world cities as the map and you have to psychically walk around to collect and solve clues? Or has that been done and it was rubbish?
Well, there was a little known game a while back, called Pokémon Go, which you may have missed. Yes, it was a phone game, but it had an Apple Watch component. And it involved using real world cities, physically, to collect things.
More interesting, arguably, was its predecessor, Ingress, which… is a bit like playing the ancient territory-capturing game Go, except using the
entire planet as the game board. You could capture and hold entire cities, if you worked with other players on your team to make it happen - I recall seeing fields that spanned oceans, from one continent to another - and that all involved people physically going to real world locations. Literally, millions of “points of interest” worldwide, used as bases for the game. You could link 3 bases (called
portals) together into a triangle called a
field (the limitation being, no field could cross lines with another field - but fields could entirely contain smaller fields). Two teams in a constant struggle to capture as much territory as possible under their fields. (Fun fact - all those PokeStops and Gyms that made Pokémon Go work? They were all mapped out in the real world, and added to Niantic’s database, by Ingress players.)
Both of these games are still up and running, and played by quite a few people, though the pandemic hit them pretty hard (I played Ingress from the day it was released on the iPhone - it was originally Android only - until several months after PoGo released, and finally gave up PoGo many months into the pandemic - in both, there were large and enthusiastic local communities, and we pulled off all sorts of fun events).
So, yes, that kind of thing has been done, and it wasn’t rubbish. Making it run
only on the watch might be possible at this point, but the big limitation would be the battery - Ingress and PoGo are
notorious for draining batteries (constantly using the CPU, the GPU, the screen, the GPS, and the network connection, for hours on end) and everyone used external battery packs… the Watch has no easy way to connect a battery while you walk around, so either the game would have to be
much less interactive, or you’d only get to play for, say, 20 minutes on a charge.
