With wireless gaming finally beginning to catch fire, game developers are learning to exploit the most basic element of the mobile phone: its ability to communicate.
Developers have learned that a successful console game doesn’t necessarily make for a good experience on a handset. They have also seen the advantages of letting gamers meet people through their phones, creating global communities of like-minded gamers.
Instead of playing sophisticated first-person shooters that while advanced tend to make gaming an isolating experience, such as in Tom Clancy’s “Splinter Cell” series, many mobile users are playing extremely simple titles, then chatting with fellow gamers and posting high scores on community boards.
Kayak, a California-based developer, offers a handful of games, including interactive chess, dominoes, backgammon and poker titles.
“I think it’s a fundamental human desire to want to interact with people,” said Kevin Bradshaw, Kayak’s senior vice president of content and distribution at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show last month in San Francisco. “The game isn’t the commodity; it’s the way people find each other in the first place.”
Because of network lag times, true remote mobile-to-mobile multi-player gaming can be painfully slow. Technologies such as Bluetooth can help address network issues, but each player’s handset must have the technology to play. Bluetooth also requires gamers to be within just a few feet of each other, minimizing the true advantages of wireless. However, by 2006, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group plans to incorporate multicast capabilities to the technology designed to support multi-player gaming. (See related story on page 17.)
But games like golf and checkers feature interactive play on a turn-by-turn basis, overcoming timing issues and allowing users to play games over the course of hours or days.
With new racing games such as Digital Bridges’ “2 Fast 2 Furious,” users can “record” game performances and upload them to a server. When downloaded by another player, the performance appears on-screen as a “ghost” car-enabling a kind of virtual head-to-head competition.
“The race against the ghost is the first step to what we hope will be a kind of viral marketing of the game,” said Paul Maglione, senior vice president of marketing for Digital Bridges, a U.K. publisher. “Your friends are in the phone; that’s your little gang … All of the sudden, you have a very powerful marketing resource around these mobile games,” said Maglione.
Some publishers have begun hosting communities themselves, allowing users to post messages, high scores and ghost performances on their servers. Even carriers have picked up on the idea-Sprint PCS and AT&T Wireless Services Inc. have established “game lobbies” to lure mobile video-game fans.
The key, according to Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins, is understanding the shortcomings of a handset while exploiting its advantages.
“(Countless) people are playing fairly unsophisticated, low-tech games because they want to be part of a community,” said Hawkins, who founded video-game giant Electronic Arts before moving to mobile. “If the public wants to play a really good video game, they should sit home and play their PlayStations.”
This is not to say that home console games are doomed to be lost in translation to handsets, of course. “Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow” and Digital Bridges’ mobile version of EA Sports’ “FIFA Soccer” are among the top sellers nationally. But developers say that when it comes to mobile phones, connected gaming is better than isolated gaming.
“The driver is being socially connected,” said Hawkins. “People are kind of desperate for a sort of social intimacy.”
One of Digital Chocolate’s recent hits is “Bubble Ducky,” a Tetris-like game where players control a duck to pop on-screen bubbles. Other titles include “Mobile League Solitaire” and “Babysitter,” which is targeted toward children up to 4 years old.
The firm is also developing a simulated gardening game that will allow players to grow virtual plants and flowers. Gamers could create gardens for each other, then send multimedia message service “snapshots” as a kind of personalized mobile greeting card.
An added benefit to such games is that they attract nontraditional users. Most gamers are young men.
“Solitary gaming is less interesting than gaming that takes place within a community,” said Rob Nashak of publisher Sorrent Inc. “And if you want to capture part of the women’s market, that’s the way to go.”
Sorrent recently agreed to develop mobile versions of titles by PopCap Games, an Internet community gaming firm. The offerings will include a word hunt, an arcade-style game and an action puzzler featuring a fire-spitting stone frog.
While Hawkins said he sees “a lot of monkey-see, monkey-do thinking” among developers, analysts agree that the mobile gaming arena will be big enough to support a vast array of game genres. There’s little doubt the long-awaited mobile gaming market is finally real.
“There’s venture capital everywhere; everyone wants a piece of the action,” said Anders Evju, Digital Bridges’ vice president and general manager of U.S. operations. “We haven’t seen the tip of the iceberg … It hasn’t started yet.”
