To browse Academia. The paper examines the challenges and prospects of the European mobile game ecosystem, emphasizing the significance of mobile telephony penetration and the need for standardized mobile Application Programming Interfaces APIs to support growth. Through the Mobile Game Arch project, the research identifies barriers hindering industry advancement and proposes a roadmap for enhancing the competitiveness of European small and medium-sized enterprises SMEs in the mobile gaming sector.
Mobile games are a main example of both a successful mobile application and the increasing range of platforms for the media and entertainment industries. Against this convergent background, the paper introduces the basic features of the mobile gaming market and its industrial ecosystem with main actors and activities. Its focus lies on the challenges ahead for its evolution into a potentially dominant game platform and on the possible disruptions along this road.
This paper is an introduction to the domain of wireless games. It presents a brief history of mobile gaming, a number of important technologies and introduces classification and evaluation concepts and criteria. A multiplayer, multi-platform card game developed in the University of Oulu, is used to present authors' own experiences in this field. There are many new forms of entertainment in game industry. Often some of the forms are neglected in academic focus and research. Usually this is the case with marginal game forms.
This paper will introduce two different, mobile device based game forms from the 21 st century that are very successful among the users but are left out from the centre of game research. Qualitative studies of geocaching and SMS-to-TV human-hosted interactive TV games were conducted by analyzing the field of geocaching by interviewing players and analysing geocachers' web-pages and forums on the Internet and iTV-entertainment by recording sample of interactive TV-formats.
These game phenomena were analyzed and discussed to answer the following questions: What kind of game culture these games represent? What new viewpoints they offer to the field of game studies? What are the reasons behind their success? What different dimensions can be found? Finally, why is it important to study marginal games and what can be learned from them? A closer look at game-based learning reveals tensions between the two parties games and learning.
