Talk at Mobile Monday Barcelona

Here are the annotated slides (pdf, 4.2Mb) of the talk I gave at Mobile Monday Barcelona. Thank you Fabien and Rudy for inviting me there.

The talk was entitled “Sinking one’s teeth into new metaphors for mobile gaming” and was basically a critique of the current state of mobile gaming. Instead of describing 3D on cell phones, location-based gaming or augmented reality, I encouraged mobile game designers to consider 3 other avenues:
- rather than mobile gaming, what we have today is “immobile gaming” (as shown on the picture above, that I took last year in Geneva). So an opportunity is to benefit from motion/mobility instead of immobile situations.
- remember that a phone is not only a small screen and little buttons: you can use other inputs (blow in the phone) and other outputs (tv-screen)
- keep in mind that infrastructures (hardware/software/networks) are not always perfect and
reliable so revealing the seams or taking advantage of them is a pertinent agenda (seamful design)

Down the road, all this stuff can be seen as metaphor or opportunities for mobile games of the near future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 12:56 am and is filed under Tangible/Intangible. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Talk at Mobile Monday Barcelona”

  1. Paul Coulton Says:
    April 3rd, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    Nicolas

    The talk looked good I would have liked to have attended it. The work on blowing is very interesting I hadn’t seen this project but had seen that Nintendo have something similar as part of the Warioware Games for the DS (which I think is one of the most innovative commercial games packages). In terms of the pedometer the accelerometers I used on the Nokia 5500 have been used for this by Nokia for their sports application which you could use for your offline gaming project. I very much agree about differing interfaces I have been going back to the camera recently and looking into tracking algorithms. The link below gives a flavour

    http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/view_entry.html?id=450

  2. Nicolas Says:
    April 3rd, 2007 at 9:54 pm

    Thanks Paul.

    Don’t worry I following your blog closely (as you can guess from my slides) ;)

    As for the blowing interface, Nintendogs on the NintendoDS also uses the microphone: you can blow and create bubbles for your dog.

  3. Paul Coulton Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    Nicolas

    I often wonder if anyone actually reads my stuff so its nice to hear people are.

    Funny my daughter has Nintendogs but never spotted that. Probably cos she got bored and plays Mario Karts most of the time.

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