On the Go: GDC 2008
by Josh Knowles 
Game Developers Conference 2008 took place February 18 - 22 in San Francisco. Catch up with some highlights from the GDC Mobile panels.
While I was unable to attend GDC 2008 in person, I have been keeping up via the myriad blog posts, reports, videos and podcasts that have been created around it. One very cool part of the conference was GDC Mobile, a track of panels dedicated to the discussion of mobile phones as a gaming platform. Mobile gaming is an interesting and mostly uncracked nut, so it’s exciting to hear what new approaches people have to it.
Many of these panels were about business and technical development. Valuable, yes, but what I find much more interesting are the panels about new forms of gameplay and how mobile phone games are actually designed from a creative standpoint. How are people playing games? What new kinds of games are on the horizon? Why are mobile games different from console or computer games? These are the questions that interest me. So I’m going to dig out some interesting perspectives on these questions. If you’d like to see more complete in- depth coverage, there are many places to go. Gamasutra has coverage. So does Games On Deck.
Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive VP of Markets, gave the keynote. He differentiated mobile games from traditional games and name-checked urban games such as Manhattan Story Mashup, which I had the pleasure of playing, as examples of what makes the phone unique as a gaming platform. He hit upon the term “contextual games” (which I have not heard before) to label these sorts of games that fit into the context of players’ lives rather than being immersive, isolated gaming spaces. To me, this is an important point. What he calls the “fourth screen” - the screen on your mobile device - is necessarily smaller and less immersive than the first three screens (movie theater screens, television screens, computer screens). Personally, I don’t care for the graphically rich 3D games I’ve played on my device - it just isn’t designed for that sort of interaction. But games that build upon the characteristics of mobile devices - GPS, social connectivity, media creation - that’s interesting. It excites me to hear this kind of talk from higher-ups at Nokia.
Social gaming interests me a great deal, whether on mobile phones or on the web or wherever. The panel “Connecting Mobile Games and MMOs” broached this topic. Dan Roy of “undisclosed startup” presented. There are a handful of gaming startups that are attempting to bridge the MMO world with the mobile world in various ways with varying degrees of success. It’s a cool concept: an MMO universe such as World of Warcraft or Second Life (to use glaringly obvious examples) is always “on - why not have ways for players to integrate gameplay with their lives outside of the game. He mentions Ragnarok Mobile Mage, which has little single-player mobile games that let players earn money to be used in the full MMO world. (Though, apparently: “It sucks. It’s terribly designed.”) Armada Kingdoms is another game he mentions which keeps players up-to-date with SMS content and other mobile information relating to the actions in the MMO universe of the game.
I think this sort of “windowing” is interesting. It really does seem to promise to enhance the feeling that the MMO world you are playing in is actually a real world somewhere that pulses and moves even if you don’t happen to be fully immersed. Mobile services such as Twitter and Dodgeball have allowed this type of windowing into the ongoing social lives of our friends, so why not introduce the concept to MMOs? Again, it’s a very cool and compelling idea. The examples he brings up seem to dance around some fun implementations, but it seems like we have yet to see something that really clicks in a “Yes, that’s it!” sort of way. (Maybe you disagree! This is a really good topic for discussion in the comments section below.)
Another company that has found a successful niche in mobile social gaming was brought up in David Collier’s “Mobile Social Entertainment: Next Big Thing from Japan” panel. The panel seemed to largely be about Flash Lite as a game development platform, but the Japanese “Mobile Game Town” social game is also a really interesting thing to look at. It’s essentially small, casual games collected together and, as such, really easy to get into and addictive. But by playing these games one also participates in the social network of the game. Apparently this is hugely popular in Japan at the moment.
It’s an interesting angle, though little about it screams “mobile” (it could very well exist as web games) except that this new breed of casual games seems very well-suited for mobile gaming. I don’t play casual games on my laptop very often; when I’m at my laptop, there are other things I’m more interested in doing. But I will whip out my N800 or iPod at airports or on the subway and get into really silly games for a few minutes just to kill time. Mobile Game Town is successful, but there may be a deeper way to mine this combination between quick, casual games and social gaming.
So there’s obviously way too much that happened at GDC Mobile and way too many interesting panels to go over everything. I do hope, though, that I’ve given a few jumping off points, not just into reading more about the conference, but actually exploring some of these issues of mobile game design in deeper ways. The mobile platform as a gaming platform is an obvious one, but the paradigms of design are so radically different from every other digital gaming platform that it’s going to take a lot of experimentation and bold moves on the part of game designers to find those hooks into a great mobile experience. That’s why this is going to be such an awesome area to keep an eye on in the coming years.
Did you attend GDC Mobile? Do you have additional thoughts on this topic? Share them in the comments section.
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