Question about Mobile Multiplayer Games asked on ForumOxford. Tomi responded. For me Mogi stood out, especially in regard to DokoDare, an upcoming project we are working on.

Mogi - Mobile Multiplayer Game

See also:
Ajit's post about it

Developing multiplayer applications with Flash Lite XMLSockets and Java NIO
Multi-Player Mobile Game with FLASH LITE 2

Three Trends Driving Big Games - Social Un-tethered Games With Computers In Them

I think there are three key trends that will drive this concept of Big Games way beyond it’s current niche role:

Current Trends:

1. The rise of mobile converged devices - computer, phone, internet access, camera, audio
2. The rise of the mobile “evernet” - persistent connections for mobile devices (3G, 4G and Wimax)
3. Co-creation - the growth youtube, wikipedia, blogs, podcasts is an indication of motivation

Future trend:

• Augmented reality - location based meta data in the real world, imagine wikipedia overlaying the street your walking down.

See also:
Desktop Tower of Money: 3 tips to profit from casual games

“Mobile games in Japan” is a free mini-report by Jan released to mark the launch of the Wireless World Forum Mobile Games ERP series of reports and conference.

Your Cell Is A Slacker: Mobile Phones Are More Fun Outside The U.S.

In the unconventional category was a service the two cited called LISMO, which allows Japanese users with GPS-enabled cell phones to find out which songs are the most commonly downloaded ones on their home street or in the nearby area.

[...] And not everything on Bellows and Collier's world tour was a strange sideshow. They spent one of the longest chunks of their tour discussing the increasing viability of using cell phones to buy stuff. This application, they said, is booming in Japan. They described an Amazon.com-like cell-phone service called GirlsWalker that boasts 9 million subscribers.

Image source: playstation.jp

I had to post this:) - it's definitely not an ad for techno-angst people.

As it is not possible to order japanese PSP titles through Amazon Japan - and if you read this blog you probably know what I was looking for -, I had to find another solution.

Jean Snow directed me to www.lik-sang.com.


One of the games is Train Simulator which simulates a train ride through Tokyo (Keisei Line, Toei Line, Keikyu Line) ( train map).

I just wanted to buy Katamari Damacy for the PSP via Amazon.jp, but my order was refused. I already had this with another japanese game. Why can't I regularly import a game which will not come to Europe anyway (the PS2 Version never did)?

And then there seems to be another "silly" PSP game that rocks: it's called LocoRoco.

I just recently discovered the visual eldorado of Katamari Damacy. Now I read about a mobile version of the game. Does anybody know more details about a probable release?
There will be a version for the PSP on december 22 and there is some stuff for the mobile too.

Namco To Develop Cell-Phone Version of Katamari Damacy

If ever there was a game begging to be turned into a cell-phone game, Namco’s Katamari Damacy is it. Deeply strange and hypnotically addictive, Katamari is also
simple to play with great replay appeal. It’s also attracted a truly rabid
fan-base. In many ways, it’s the ideal game for the mobile phone.
Unfortunately, Namco never committed to a version for mobile. Until
now. I had the opportunity to chat with Scott Rubin, Namco’s North
American GM recently, and he promised a mobile version of KD was in the
works. “It’s one of our favorite titles internally, and we’ve already
sent versions of the PS2 game to all of our carrier partners,” said Rubin. “And they loved it.”

See also:
Katamari creator dreams of playgrounds (BBC News)

It’s a phone, not a console! (PDF) is an interesting paper about mobile games by Marko Turpeinen, Risto Sarvas, Fernando Herrera from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

Hmm, for a certain kind of gaming the PSP has still a lot of advantages - bigger screen, game-oriented buttons... And games are explicitely made for these consoles.

On the other hand I also think that there are a lot of possibilities with mobile phones not yet even touched nor discovered. But it's a different breed of games.

There are advantages and disadvantages on both sides and maybe we should just not look at it as either or but rather as two possible devices for games. Time will tell what kind of games have the greatest appeal on the different devices.

Via Nicolas

Excerpts from It is a phone not a console!:

Current trends in commercial mobile game development seem to follow the path of games made for portable game decks rather than taking advantage of the special characteristics of a mobile phone. Presumably, porting well-understood game concepts onto the mobile phone presents a smaller financial risk in the form of familiarity in marketing, development, and user adoption. As we have presented above, there are gamelike phenomena that leverage sociality, connectivity, media creation, and mobility. Furthermore, the phones are very personal devices; they know a lot about the user and lend themselves as vehicles for selfexpression.
Also, the phone can be a part of richer cross-media concepts, phones enable an alternative way of billing for gaming content, they are a communication medium for TV entertainment, and a source of extra information when playing in the real world. These characteristics can and should be used to differentiate mobile phone games from game deck games.

[...] However, the learning curve for consumers to understand what mobile gaming can really be about should not be underestimated. It is already hard enough to communicate to people about basic mobile games. Perhaps this is the reason why simple mobile games like bowling are very popular. One approach could be to gradually add features that leverage sociality, mobility, connectivity, self-expression, phone billing etc. into mobile game concepts that people are already familiar with. Then move towards more innovative concepts as the mainstream market becomes used to the special characteristics of mobile gaming. Another approach would be to introduce the mobile phone as a gaming device into game-like activities where these features already exist and the concepts are familiar. For example, Geocaching combines connectivity, mobility, and sociality, and online betting, which is a well-known and popular game format, combines mobility, sociality, money transfer, and cross-media.