With multi-touch, the outlook on strategy games is shifting:

Similarly to the age of Dune 2, we now see the uprising of (multi-)touch devices, and this allows for an even more direct interaction with units. It’s probably no mystery to you that playing games that use multi-touch well on the iPhone is great, but as we are approaching more varied applications of touch interfaces in our daily lives, there’s much more innovative interfaces we can create, and we’re presented with the opportunity to make the Zoomable User Interface a ‘natural’ experience.

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Of course, only time can tell where we will be taken in the future when it comes to interface design. However, it’s interesting to note that we’re gradually making the experience more tactile. While giving users a controller that resembles a gun to play a shooter game doesn’t work very well and feels rather gimmicky, making a realistic landscape that the user can reach out to and touch seems like the natural evolution for strategy games. It shares some of the best characteristics from the origin of strategy games: the board game.

RTSes need to adapt: interfaces that utilize much smaller or larger screen real estate, mechanics that fit this regression to a tactile feel, etc. Without this change, they’ll be left behind and relegated to the stagnant space of traditional PCs—but if they can adopt this shift, the RTS genre will be on the brink of a rebirth.

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