Games will need a radical rethink to work in AR | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

I was combing through video game patents recently (as one does), and I came across the above picture of what appears to be a pirate and a monster pirate menacingly staring out of two different front windows on an otherwise unremarkable and nice-appearing home.

The patent was for a "virtualized environment" system of the sort that could be used to spruce up haunted houses. And while that's perhaps augmented reality-adjacent at best, my first thought upon seeing the image was, "Augmented reality gaming is doomed."

Okay, not my first thought. My first thought was, "This looks like something out of Tom Hanks' 1989 dark comedy The 'Burbs," quickly followed by, "I wonder if The 'Burbs would be better appreciated today than it was back then" and, "Is The 'Burbs streaming anywhere?" After that came an IMDB rabbit hole recap of director Joe Dante's one-of-a-kind career, which is admirably all over the map. Gremlins, Explorers, The Howling, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Hawaii Five-0, Amazon Women on the Moon… it just keeps going.

But immediately after that, my first thought was, "Augmented reality gaming is doomed." Or to be more slightly more nuanced about it, "augmented reality as it applies to contemporary ideas of gaming is doomed."

In some ways this gets back to my initial reaction to Apple's Vision Pro announcement and how the company didn't feature games in any significant way. I initially took that as evidence Apple was largely disinterested in the medium of games, an