Tikkabik

John Martellaro's recent analysis of Apple's gaming position has some interesting moments.

One hand, I agree with some of Martellaro's points: Apple clearly has a position that doesn't include gaming as part of the overall marketing message or message to developers, at least right now. Apple's not courting either consumers or game makers who want to use their Macs to play games, with the exception of some slight, passing lip service on its Games page and in the graphics areas on its computer spec pages.

Unfortunately, Martellaro veers the bus off the road and plummeting down the side of a cliff when he comes up with this howler:

When you have several hundred senior managers at Apple who are most likely married and typically have children, you'll find a culture of affirmation, family, and life

Huh? Just who the hell does Martellaro thinks runs the show at places like EA, THQ, Ubisoft, Activision and 2K Games? Most of the middle and senior managers and senior game designers I'm familiar with have families; many have kids as well.

Listen, Apple has a lot of reasons why it doesn't do a better job of catering to the games market. I suspect that the wise words of a friend of mine are right: Apple probably doesn't perceive gaming as a priority that pulls people to the Mac OS X platform, so why emphasize it? Only the most clueless company is going to throw good money after bad by emphasizing a strategic weakness rather than a strength.

But to imply that Apple's senior management are a bunch of feel-good hippies sitting cross-legged around a campfire singing "Kumbayah" while roasting their veggie burgers on sticks is just silly. There are a lot of sound business reasons why Apple doesn't get more involved with games, rather than emotional ones. I don't like them any more than the next gamer -- in fact, I rail against them, but that doesn't change their existence.

Martellaro also opines that Steve Jobs doesn't like military games because he's a hippie, and hippies hate the military.

Steve Jobs hates meat, too, but that doesn't stop Apple from serving it in the cafeteria, or, for that matter, selling a leather iPod case of its own. I don't think Jobs is one to categorically put his own philosophy ahead of a good business plan.

Don't forget -- a few years ago, Steve Jobs shared the Macworld Expo keynote stage in Tokyo with John Carmack, co-founder of id Software. Carmack -- an old NeXT developer -- announced that id's next game, Doom 3, would support the Mac. Before that, Jobs used his time at a Macworld Expo in New York to show off Halo (and then Bungie got bought out by Microsoft, but that's another story).

And Doom 3 did indeed come out for the Mac (though it took a while). So this isn't a man who's averse to giving games some time on the Macworld Expo keynote stage.

But he's also not one to make the same mistake over and over again. And I'm sure that from his perspective, Apple's made overtures to gamers and to game developers, and hasn't seen a huge uptick in that market. So why should Apple keep making the same mistake over and over again?