Recently I took on a project that required, among other things, a brief summary of the state of mobile gaming. My conclusion, in a nutshell, was that we need a lot more “1 Button Games.” The average cellphone has fifteen buttons that event handlers can be attached to. That means that, at most, a cellphone game could use fourteen buttons too many.

Feel free to correct me if you feel I am wrong, but the principle method through which people interface with their cellphones is by holding the device in their hand while pushing buttons with their thumb. So when a game requires me to hold my phone alá a circa 1987 Gameboy, the game is going against the dominant interface method.

Now if I choose to hold a non-qwerty phone as I would an ‘87 Gameboy, it becomes obvious that I am doing something other than normal non-speaking cellphone actions. This doesn’t really bug me when I’m on the light rail or killing time elsewhere, but there are times when I want to play a game and I don’t want it to be obvious that I am playing a game.

For example:

I was sitting in on an hour long conference call last week and really only needed to be present for five minutes. The only problem is, we had no idea when that agenda item was going to be called upon. Now as is typical these days, everyone in the room was only half there anyway as they were listening, speaking when they needed to, and replying to emails via Blackberry the rest of the time. I’m still attached to my Nokia 6682 until I get my Neo 1973, so while I had checked my e-mail, I wasn’t really interested in replying via predictive text.

Even though everyone’s presence in the room was very distributed, it would have been rude to obviously be playing a game…this doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be rude to be playing game period. Holding my phone in the Gameboy position, would have been being obvious about it and there isn’t another good was to go about playing a game that relies on repetitive use of the 4 & 6 (or similarly mapped) keys.

While a control scheme featuring two buttons typically requires me to hold my cellphone in an obvious manner, schemes that require more than two buttons are simply annoying. One game I was looking at used four buttons (2, 4, 6, 8). The keys on most cellphones are so close together that this becomes uncomfortably. The 4 & 6 were my home keys, and I used my right thumb to press the 2 & 8 when needed. The annoying part was that in order to push the 2 or 8, I had to shift my left thumb off the 4 in order to make room for the left thumb. Note to developers: close proximity of keys is an affordance of mobile devices, not a design flaw that someone is going to get around to fixing.

This brings me to the virtues of the 1 button game. First of all, I’m not referring to a game featuring a single event handler. The vast majority of cellphones now feature an multi-directional button or analog thumb stick, which provides you with four orthogonal directions and a fire/action button. Perhaps it will be ironic to some, but this is the same input schema that was available to every Atari 2600 game that used a joystick so don’t tell me that a game needs more than that to be successful. Incidentally, the best games I found in my survey were ports of early arcade / 2600 games. That’s right, the best games available to the mobile platform today are 25-30 years old.

All in all I’m not making explicit reference to casual games, I am just asking for more games that I can play casually in terms of time and interface with the device….and I don’t like BeJeweled. So someone needs to make that epic 5-10 hour mobile game that can be meaningfully played in 5 minute blocks and only requires the use of the multi-d button / thumbstick.

I’d love to have a counter-point on this one, so calling all cars.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 12:07 am and is filed under mobile games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.