Apple iOS 9 News App Puts Video Games in 'Entertainment' Section

July 10, 2015 12:04 PM EDT

Go look for book, film or music news, and you’ll probably wind up scouring Google’s aggregation tool. There, filed neatly under “Entertainment,” you’ll find stories about George R.R. Martin’s Winds of Winter, the first chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, and teasers for the upcoming Ghostbusters film reboot or the Sherlock TV series’ 2015 Christmas special.

But news about Bethesda’s sprawling new post-apocalyptic roleplaying opus Fallout 4? “Zombies” mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3? The latest scuttlebutt about Nintendo’s upcoming “NX” console? You’ll have to swing over to “Technology.”

Sure, “Entertainment’s” also thronged with gossip about donut-licking pop music idols and tawdry celebrity shenanigans—hardly distinguished company. But the message is implicit: books, movies and music are “Arts,” while games are…something else.

Indeed, games are something else. Print books are migrating to e-readers and films plus music are now artifacts we can summon magically from our phones. But shifts in gaming are comparably tectonic. Game design is fueled by reality control fantasies, and interface recalibration over time is in its DNA. Think arcade cabinets, home computers, devoted consoles and handhelds, and now smartphones and tablets. Think about Nintendo and the Wii. Think about Oculus and its wraparound VR headset. Think about the point at which true virtual reality arrives.

Games are lashed to technological momentum’s mast, in other words, driven as much by revolutions in the semiconductor industry as revelatory design ideas. Books and movies don’t undergo motion control upheavals, or have elaborate Early Access programs whereby players can significantly influence development. Scanning music tracks (play, skip ahead, skip behind) in today’s streaming apps still works basically the same as punching buttons on boomboxes and Sony Walkmans did decades ago. Games, by contrast, occupy the space between those older, staid categories.

Sticking games in “Technology” has consequences. The filter reinforces stereotypes of technology as cold, clinical, sterile—ultimately apart from the artful or sublime. It frustrates gaming’s slouch toward basic validation as a legitimate art form (beyond its ivory tower acolytes).

So it’s with surprise and pleasure that I’m discovering Apple’s new “News” app, found in its just released iOS 9 beta, files game stories under “Entertainment” and not “Technology.” That, given how long games have labored under Google and Yahoo’s domineering framework, feels huge.

See The 15 Best Video Game Graphics of 2014

**Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare**. Activision's futuristic first-person shooter in which players take on a rogue private military company uses a brand new engine built specifically for PCs and new-gen consoles to handle its cutting-edge lighting, animation and physics. Sledgehammer Games/Activision

**Far Cry 4**. This pulled back shot of fictional Himalayan region Kyrat is in-game, believe it or not, rendered with an overhauled version of the engine Ubisoft used to design *Far Cry 3*. Ubisoft

The Last of Us Remastered — **The Last of Us: Remastered**. Naughty Dog's meditation on the worst (and best) of humanity is built on technology that reaches back through the studio's pulp-adventure *Uncharted* series. The graphics are so impressive, TIME recently assigned a conflict photographer to photograph inside the game.Ashley Gilbertson for TIME

**Alien: Isolation** Built from scratch, the *Alien: Isolation* engine's outstanding deep space visuals all but replicate the set design of *Alien* film concept artists H.R. Giger and Ron Cobb's work. The Creative Assembly

**Assassin's Creed Unity**. Ubisoft says it "basically remade the whole rendering engine" in its AnvilNext design tool to handle the studio's meticulous recreation of Paris during the French Revolution. Ubisoft

**Child of Light** Inspired by filmmakers like Hayao Miyazaki and artist Yoshitaka Amano, *Child of Light*'s hand-drawn artwork puts the lie to presumptions that graphical richness depends on shader support or polygon counts. Ubisoft

**Destiny** Built from scratch by ex-Halo studio Bungie, *Destiny*'s game engine was designed to scale across the next decade, says the studio. Bungie

**Mario Kart 8** Nintendo's kart-racer for Wii U reminds us that raw horsepower is just a facet of crafting a beautiful game world. Nintendo

**Infamous Second Son** Sucker Punch's freeform Seattle-based superhero adventure models all sorts of minutia, from the intricate wrinkling of an aged character's face to the way eyelids stick, slightly, before separating when characters blink. Sucker Punch Productions

**Monument Valley** Escher-like at first glance, Ustwo's mind-bending puzzler was also inspired by posters, bonsai plants, arabic calligraphy and filmmaker Tarsem Singh's *The Fall*. Ustwo

**Grand Theft Auto V** Rockstar's remastered crime spree opus was crafted from an in-house engine first employed in a game that simulated table tennis. Rockstar

**Forza Horizon 2** Turn 10's Euro-racer actually models light refracted through drops of moisture, the render tech plausibly simulating something as intangible but essential as the earth’s atmosphere. Microsoft Studios/Turn 10 Studios

**80 Days** Inkle's anti-colonialist vamp on Jules Verne's famous novel uses crisp art deco imagery inspired by travel posters to unfurl *80 Days*' tale of intrepid globetrotters Monsieur Fogg and his valet Passepartout. Inkle

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition — **Tomb Raider** Crystal Dynamics' radical reboot of its popular series about an athletic archaeologist uses a modified version of the engine that powered *Tomb Raider: Legend* in 2006. Square Enix

Apple News, in case you’re just hearing about it, brings Cupertino’s graceful form-and-function balancing act to story curation on the iPhone and iPad. Launch it, and it’ll ask that you select preferred media outlets before folding your choices into a stream with elegantly feng shui’d headlines and body text. Tap on “Explore,” and you can alternately browse by categories like “Food,” “Politics,” “Science” and so on. It’s all pretty standard fare.

But click “Entertainment,” and you’ll find channels for Vanity Fair, Billboard, Complex, Vulture…and Polygon. The latter is a games-slash-gaming-culture site. In the historical echelons of news curators like Google, Yahoo and now Apple, Polygon’s divorce from “Technology” (the sites stories still appear in the latter category on Google News) is kind of groundbreaking.

That said, the move feels tentative. There’s a “Browse Topics” section below “Browse Channels,” for instance, that includes categories like “Performing arts,” “Books and literature,” and “Pop music,” but nothing generalist for games, say an “Interactive entertainment” search. And Polygon, as far as I can tell, is all there is for game channels at this point. Where’s Kill Screen? Offworld? Quarter to Three?

Assuming Polygon’s filing under “Entertainment” was intentional, my hat’s off to Apple for boldly leading here. I just hope we’re seeing the tip of an iceberg, as opposed to an errant ice cube.

Apple’s iOS 9 is still in beta, of course, so everything could change. Call it a metaphor for where we’re at culturally, weighing gaming as a technology-driven or technology-transcendent medium, and still, clearly, in beta mode.

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