One of my ongoing pursuits is being a Jane Goodall of sorts in relation to mobile gaming (phone-type devices, not Gameboys or PSPs). A facet of this design anthropology that I find particularly interesting is examining how larger/more complex games are adapted/devolved to work with mobile’s affordances and limitations. Recently I’ve come across two mobile adaptations of existing game experiences that share a common strategy.

For lack of a better term, I will call this the “Always On” strategy- meaning that a core function of gameplay, which the player controls in other versions of the game, is simply always on in the mobile version. The reasoning behind this strategy is if players are doing Action X most of the time in the console version of the game, given the limited interface of mobile devices, it should be ok for them to being doing Action X all of the time in the mobile version.

First of all, a poor implementation:

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Mobile is the Xbox Live Arcade’s smash hit faithfully brought to mobile devices. A modern arcade-style game in the spirit of Robotron: 2084, Asteroids, and Tempest, the player controls a “ship” that must annihilate an onslaught of circles, squares, and diamonds. This is the most intense action ever created for cell phones - deep gameplay and simple pick-up-and-play controls combine for the ideal mobile game experience. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Mobile brings gamers the addictive action of the original, anywhere and anytime. (src)

In Geometry War: REM, the “always on action” is the firing of your weapon. I’m guessing that the designers thought that by always having your blasters blazing, you would be free to do things like fly around. Well flying around is kind of pointless because if you continually rotate your ship in a 360 degree cardinality, you are pretty much invincible. In fact as soon as I figured out how to do this (the first time I played GW: REM), I couldn’t go back to playing the way that the designers intended. The 360 degree exploit isn’t fun, but the way the designers intended isn’t exactly riveting gameplay either.

Secondly, a decent implementation:

To be honest, I don’t know the full story with this game. It might be a complete fan creation or it might be a cracked/modded version of a licensed commercial game. Regardless, Antone Samy’s Super Mario Planet  (also here) is a good first draft of a mobile Mario game.

Super Mario Planet’s “always on action” is running- Mario is always running forward. What makes this different than other ‘on rails’ games is that, to a certain degree, players can accelerate and decelerate within the frame of the advancing screen. For the most part, this works. I’ve played a straight Symbian port of the original Super Mario Bros, and it didn’t play well. Trying to run and jump at the same time was just too much for the 1 or 2 button control scheme so not having to worry about running as much was a refreshing change of pace. That being said, Super Mario Planet’s level design isn’t great. I’ve actually cleared every level, but all too often I felt that I got lucky rather than being good.

So in adapting an existing game for mobile, or developing an original title, maybe designers should consider defaulting to an “always on action.” The only problem is that it can break your game as much as it can make it.

In about a week and a half, Come Out & Play 2007 will kick-off as part of PICNIC ‘07 in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I am not able to make the festival due to scheduling issues, but past collaborators David Jimison and Jeff Crouse have a game so Georgia Tech will be proudly represented. Hopefully my accepted entry Disavow! will find its way into to CO&P ‘08 this coming spring in NYC.

Out of curiosity I surveyed this year’s entries based on my sub-genres for appropriative games (list below), and was surprised at what I found. Given the perceived mobile sophistication of Europe compared to the US, I expected a large percentage of games to heavily leverage mobile and fall into the realm of pervasive prototyping/ubiquitous gaming. Now while a few of the games do leverage higher end mobile features (the Nokia N95 seems popular), just as many employed no computation at all. In fact, I would go as far as to wager that the big games will be the stars of the festival.

I’m hoping to get a few on site reports, and will post them if they come in.

Big Games

• Bocce Drift
• Censorsh**
• CounterSquirt
• Human Snake
• Manila
• People Watching
• Safari

Pervasive Games

• 3001
• CollecTic
• FUSE INVASION
• Lumenatio
• Navball
• OMMRPG
• Snap Shot City
• The Target

Ubiquitous Games

• Can You See Me Now?
• de Pong

Alternate Reality Games

• TAH II

ITEM: Bogost on Cobert

Ian Bogost will be on the Cobert Report tonight. This is cool. Ian’s style of rockstar academics should have some interesting chemistry with Cobert’s interview style. I’ll link the Youtube video when it shows up.

…image borrowed from Joystiq.

ITEM: 1 Button Games

I got some interesting responses to my 1 Button Games rant (mostly from the Northern European mobile community). First of all, everyone needs to remember that the US mobile industry is a joke compared to Europe and Asia. I’ve gotten a lot of “You should really look at [name of game].” Sadly, I can’t. I’ve found a couple of cracked J2ME versions of suggested games, but for the most part a lot of these games just can’t be found in the US.

Of the games I’ve gotten a hold of, I’ve devoted most of my attention to what I’ve been calling multi-session games. Generally speaking if I invest 5 minute play sessions here and there into a game, I would like those investments to amount to more than me quiting the game during the second Space Invaders or Pac-Man board. Most of the RPG-ish titles I’ve looked at require around 10-15 minutes to do anything meaningful in the game. Mobile games need streamlined gameplay as well as streamlined interfaces.

Remember not necessarily casual games, but games that can be played casually.

Here’s a couple links:

• One Button Games @ Forum Nokia Blogs
• One Button Games @ Gamasutra (nice flash prototype here)
• GDC: Success Factors of One-Button Casual Mobile Games @ Gamasutra

ITEM: iPhoneNES

I’ll admit I’m eagerly awaiting Apple’s official response to the #iphone-dev people. They’ve asked that blogs not link to their wiki, so I’ll take you 1/2 way there. Maybe Apple will take the nice approach that Nintendo has taken with DS Homebrew (more on DS stuff in a sec) or maybe we’ll get security update after security update.

iPhoneNES is a native NES emulator for the iPhone. Although early, the project certainly looks promising. Aside from optimizing code, the project’s owner admits that control is the biggest problem. If you do an usability evaluation strictly based on the Youtube video, the first thing that I would do to improve the control interface would be to have the emulator run in landscape mode and orient the controls in more of a PSP-esque configuration.

ITEM: NDS Motion Pak

Slightly older news, but I just saw a demo and was floored. The NDS Motion Pak is a combo accelerometer/gyroscope for DS Homebrew projects. If you’re a Homebrewer, this one is really worth it. Now I need this combined with a DS GPS in order to design a few crazy appropriative games.

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.