Happy holidays from all of us at the N-Gage Arena and Future Watch to all of you out there.
I’ve posted up the chat transcript from the Future Watch Sneak Peek in the Arena forums, so go on and take a look if you missed that event.
I’m heading off on a bit of vacation for the week, but don’t worry, Karl and Redrum will be here next week to keep things rolling along.
Have a great break and happy new year!
This morning in my inbox there was an e-mail from Jaakko Kaidesoja, the head of Nokia’s Play New Experience, which means he’s the guy in charge of everything from N-Gage to SNAP Mobile. In other words, my boss.
Entitled “Season’s Greetings,” the e-mail gave us an overview of the past twelve months — the mountain we’ve climbed — as well as the peaks still to be scaled. While not downplaying the challenges ahead, Kaidesoja said we were high enough up the mountain to see the rest of the road ahead.
Travel metaphors aside, I won’t paraphrase from the e-mail, since it is an internal communication and I do like this job as a virtual mountain-climber, but fortunately he’s also been talking publicly about similar things. What follows are a few of the juicier callouts from an interview published just yesterday in British tech journal the Inquirer.
With the success of games like World of Warcraft, it’s not surprising that the Inquirer was asking if there’s room for those kind of games on mobile (hey, don’t they remember Pocket Kingdom?).
Yes there is Kaidesoja said, but for MMO games to succeed in the mobile marketplace, a couple things need to happen. “Data fees need to be understandable and connections need to be faster and more robust,” he said. He did note that faster networks based on WDCMA, Wi-Fi, and other standards are rolling out, while more operators are moving towards a flat fee model.
As that day dawns, the infrastructure in the form of the N-Gage Arena, exists to support them. “Whether this will lead into MMOs and how — we will see soon,” he said. “but there is definitely an emerging trend of wave that we call Mobile Gaming 2.0.” He compares to the new, empowered Web 2.0 and social media like blogs.
Kaidesoja also emphasized what we’ve been saying since E3: that N-Gage is no longer a single, dedicated gaming device, but “is evolving into a mobile gaming platform which will be supported through various devices consisting of Nokia Nseries multimedia computers and other Nokia S60 devices,” he said. “We are targeting to support some 5-7 devices at launch and scaling up as we move along.”
Those were just a few of the highlights, be sure to read the whole interview.
And as always, feel free to leave a comment!
This is an interesting presentation from Shufflebrain that talks about game mechanics in the context of social media (web sites like myspace and youtube). What they are saying is that aspects of rich social web sites like myspace and youtube are kind of like a game, in the fact that you are collecting, trading, getting “points” etc. Really interesting stuff, especially if your helping design a web site to support a game platform 
Anyway, the aspects of game mechanics they break down in the presentation are:
1. Collecting
2. Points
3. Feedback
4. Exchanges
5. Customization
Welcome to the Future Watch blog, our little window into the future of connected, mobile gaming.
We realize you may have a lot of questions about the next generation of the N-Gage experience. Many of those questions pop up regularly in our discussion boards, and we also expect to see them in our comments section too. We welcome your questions and appreciate your interest in our future direction.
We’ve tried to answer the most common of these questions in our Next Generation section, so be sure to check out the FAQ there. But we also hope you also understand that as a large, publicly-traded company, Nokia has to follow a formal process on how we release information. So there’s no way for us to answer every question that will come up. Hey, we like working here too!
So that’s why Future Watch is a place for us to talk about not just the future of the N-Gage platform, but also interesting things going on in the world of mobile gaming, from the perspective of those of us working in the N-Gage Arena.
You’ll see familiar names posting here — ikona, redrum, congested — as well as new faces, other people from within and without Nokia who are working their hardest to bring the next generation of mobile gaming your way.
But just as important as our authors and are our posts are you, all of whom we hope will become regular readers. A blog is a two-way street, a place for community discussion, and your input and your insight will only increase the value of this avenue.
So in a way, this is your blog. Right now it’s an open slate, but with your feedback and interaction, it will become the resource you want it to be.
So what do you want to see? What should be talk about here? Let’s make this first thread about the Future Watch blog itself — what kind of posts do you want to see here, from who?
Have fun!
The potential for growth in the mobile gaming industry is phenomenal, says one game industry leader.
David Gosen, CEO of game publisher I-Play expects mobile gaming to eventually outstrip the mass-market penetration of traditional console game sets.
“Over 300 million consoles have been sold in the last 25 years, while 800 million phones are sold every year,” he told MobileIndustry.biz. “Which one’s mass market? It has to be the mobile device.”
Those numbers are pretty staggering, if you think about it. What do you guys think? Will gaming on mobile phones pass up traditional consoles, and if so, how soon?
Quick, think of the best videogame players you know. How many of them are left-handed?
Could be more than a few. There’s a new scientific report that claims lefties have a distinct advantage in playing videogames.
Eurogamer reports on a new article in Neuropsychology that says left-handers are better processing and coordinating a mass of information and stimuli, since they have to adapt to a right-hander’s world.
That makes their coordination of information is “more efficient.” So walk tall, southpaws. You’re a pair of quick left-handed scissors in a slothful right-hand drawer. Or something.
So what do you think? Are you a leftie or a rightie, and do you think it matters?
