“Offline gaming” opportunities in mobile gaming
Posted: March 28th, 2007 | 3 Comments »Musing in the train this morning with Frederic, we discussed a near-future laboratory topic: offline-gaming that Julian describes more thoroughly here. This is also helpful for the presentation for Mobile Monday I am working on.
Let’s start with Julian’s notes (the near future laboratory method is about knots):
“Can there be “offline gaming” where the screen disappears to the point of it not even being necessary? Where you sort of ambiently know that you’re gaming in the sense that your actions and activities “offline” will register in the game world once you get back to your normal human computer later? Can you still be gaming while you’re doing a run to the market, without being consciously and actively “in” the game while doing the grocery shop? But still, knowing in the back of your mind that, hey, cool! I’ll get my shopping done and probably get a +2 power up!“
This said, it led Frederic and I to think about 2 main axes: the connection to the network (yes, the internets) and the use of the mobile device display as the output. Therefore, we have this simple 2×2 matrix that set the design space for mobile gaming opportunities:
Strictly speaking “offline gaming” should only refer to game played out of the network but we started using it for the square “no network/no display” (maybe because “off-the-screen-offline” is not really nice to pronounce). I’ve also put “crossmedia gaming” to represent games that (for instance) can be played on cell phone and then brought back to the computer either to benefit from a larger display or an access to the network (or a larger bandwidth…), that is the case with V-migo. Instead of using the crossmedia term, one can also say that a constant access to the network is hard to reach, thus even synchronous situations are alternance of sync/async moments.
Besides, the fact that the squares are empty on the picture above does not mean that nothing has been done in them; however I have to admit that the “offline gaming” square is maybe less crowded.
Now, that would be the way to design offline gaming interactions? let’s wait a bit to gather some thoughts (but the use of motion is one of the avenue here).
Nicolas
I am intrigued by this notion of offline games I have a project called poppet using accelerometer phones as controller connecting to public display via Bluetooth. There is no display on the phone but would the connection count as networked?
See below to illustrate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqYVJ0zpDx8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXcSm94RK6A
This tilting interface looks great but there is still a display: the screen.
What we implied by “offline gaming” is absolutely no use of the screen during the players’ interaction. For example, the most basic idea would be to track people’s motion in space and use this information to make a virtual pet evolve. In a sense, the person knows he/she is playing when moving in the city but the outcome can only be seen in an asynchronous mode (back at home in the evening, on the computer for example)
I see your point and I certainly agree the applicability to mobile were you can feed into other gaming platforms. In the case of myexample the data on the screen of the mobile is just the accelerometer data we used for testing and in fact you don’t look at this at all while playing.