Hello folks,
Gaming is both a fascination and my obsession. I will spend countless hours on end, shooting zombies’ heads off or frantically attempting to pull off a radical 360-backflip on a motorbike in fantasy-like virtual worlds. I own seven gaming consoles and three portable gaming devices. Simply put, gaming is my forte. My name is Adam Wright, and I will be Mobile Media Future’s blogger discussing Mobile Gaming for the next three weeks.
The global interactive games industry is large and growing, and is at the forefront of many of the most significant innovations in new media (Flew and Humphreys 2008, 127). We stand in awe of how fast gaming’s innovation and interactivity is progressively evolving; the Nintendo Wii has motion-sensoring whilst online multiplayer gaming connects players to interact with each other globally. Mobile gaming too, is developing further and making more advances in wireless communications to satisfy a significant market that has portable gaming needs.
For those who may not know, a video game for a mobile phone, smartphone, PDA or handheld computer falls under the category of mobile gaming. However this does not include portable video game systems such as PSP or Nintendo DS (Wikipedia 2008). The fact is a mobile game has evolved from being just an "extra" application on a portable device to being a valued commodity itself. To this day, it’s quite possible that games themselves are selling the mobile devices! If you don’t believe me, take a look at the N-Gage. That’s basically Nokia’s attempt towards selling mobile devices specifically based on their gaming capabilities (Wikipedia 2008a). As Flew and Humpherys (2008, 128) state "…the games industry itself identifies direct spin-offs for technological innovation… [such as] mobile telecommunications…"
However, mobile Gaming is infamous for its noticeable flaws. Essentially consumers will most often complain that gaming on mobile devices are often too shabby, disappointing to play and difficult to install (Apocalypso 2005). Yet gaming industries have attempted to tackle the problem by employing 3D graphics, improved multiplayer activity and better use of downloading problems via the Internet.
The current craze of Apple’s iPhone has managed to achieve all these goals, as well as becoming prominent competitive gaming devices to the Nintendo DS and PSP in the market. According to Hartley (2007), Apple’s devices main lead advantage is digital distribution of their games, meaning consumers have the pleasure of convenience of grasping any game anywhere at the push of a button (or the touch of a screen). The games are also claimed to be "sophisticated", popular titles such as Super Monkey Ball are just a click away.
I don’t know about you, but my mobile phone games aren’t exactly "sophisticated". Super Mario on the DS seems the better alternative to my phone’s "Bulky Bill". But things can change, perhaps in the time to come, Mobile devices will be superior to the beloved handheld gaming thanks to convenience and connectivity.
Apocalypso. 2005. Making it easy to enjoy rich 3D and connected gaming with Nokia smartphones. http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/0505/nextgeneration.htm
(accessed September 11, 2008)
Flew, T. and S. Humpreys. 2008. Games: technology, industry, culture. In New Media: an introduction. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press.
Hartley. M. 2008. Next on Apple's agenda: video game supremacy. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080910.RAPPLE10/TPStory/Business
(accessed September 11, 2008)
Wikipedia. 2008. Mobile Gaming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_gaming (accessed September 11, 2008)
Wikipedia. 2008a. N-Gage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gage (accessed September 11, 2008)
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