mobile games

Flash Lite: Write once, run anywhere?

Up for discussion at last week's Mobile Monday Vancouver were Mobile Games. Featuring panelists from Nokia, Iugo and Smashing Ideas, one point that consistently came up was the general difficulty all three had experienced porting their mobile applications between the multitude of handsets. The rate at which new devices continue to be brought to market is staggering and porting costs now make up a significant amount of the total cost of creating and bringing a game to market. All agreed that this needed to be reduced, but how?


Mobile Interaction 2.0

In the past, mobile game developers have been handcuffed by a lack of manufacture support for advanced APIs used to access devices embedded in mobile phones. This meant GPS, internet connectivity and cameras had largely been off limits to developers.Fast forward to today. Mobile manufactures have begun to give developers the tools they need to utilize the aforementioned mobile features. The stage is set for a renaissance of mobile gaming.

One company taking advantage of these new opportunities is Superhappyfunfun with its latest offering 3D Tilt-a-World. The basic premise of the 3D Tilt-a-World is rooted in old-fashioned tilt maze games, where you physically tilt a game board at an angle to move a ball through a maze. By using recently implemented APIs to access camera data on mobile phones, Superhappyfunfun has faithfully recreated a classic.


Women and the future of mobile content

You may have read recently about the Nielsen study that observed women gamers outnumbering men two to one. There are some very good questions asked about this over at Constructing Amusement

If this weren't enough to counter your intuitions about gaming, gender and technology, consider this. A new study by M:Metrics highlights some new trends in mobile technology adoption (including mobile games), and here again, more women are coming on deck than men. From the RCR Wireless article:
Of particular note is the shifting demographic profile for active mobile content consumers. The number of females consuming ringtones and games grew by 27 percent and 21 percent, respectively, year over year. Corresponding numbers for males were growth of 15.4 percent in males downloading ringtones and a decline of 11.3 percent in the number of males downloading games. Females now account for a clear majority, or 55 percent, of ringtone purchasers. While males still have a higher propensity to download games, the ratio of male to female game downloaders has dropped from 61 percent male in 2005 to 54 percent male in 2006.
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