Scouting Workshop: Report 6
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Topic |
“How to combine Communities, Mobility and Games?” |
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Date |
5.-9. August |
Participants |
28 |
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Organiser |
Mindtrek |
Speaker |
10 |
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Venue |
Turku |
Projects Developed |
yes |
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Key
Presentations |
- Sulake Labs' best known product, Habbo Hotel (www.habbohotel.com ). Sulake is a Finnish company specializing in the development of multiplayer games and communities. Its products, such as Habbo Hotel and Coke Studios, are community-driven, readily accessible and great fun to play factors which form the core of all Sulake games.
- Dr. Sam Inkinen from the University of Vaasa with a presentation on Digital Culture.
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IST Projects |
MOGAME of Hypermedia Laboratory at the University of Tampere
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Essential Outcome and Findings |
- The mobile entertainment industry is still in its emerging stage and there are lots of technological innovations that change the industry constantly. There is not much sound empirical evidence for researchers to work with, but there is a lot of effort put into game research focusing in mobile games, especially in North European universities and research institutes, which take part in many research consortiums in the field.
- the mobile entertainment field is led by business- rather than academic players
- Difficulty of making successful solutions that have the elements of games, mobility and communities. Simplicity to use was greatly emphasized and content above technology.
- None of the presenting companies, no matter how succeeded they were, had found the philosophers stone of how to produce continuously successful products.
- Difficulty of creating innovative solutions. Many people can say what kind of services they like or do not like but few can actually innovate and create them.
- Markets have the strongest impact in creating the future of mobile entertainment, not the companies, universities or research institutes.
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Recom
mendations |
There are not yet many services that have elements from games, mobility and communities. This should be further developed. The business is just on the edge to start with that even though games on mobile phones are still at the stage they had on computers in the 80s and communities are very strong in the internet. A challenge would be to converge all these elements for a mobile device but still taking care of the specialities of mobile devices (easiness, low weight)
In Germany there is at least one such game in the market (called Tibia micro Edition) and such games are predicted to be the drivers of the huge growth of mobile gaming. The Hypermedia laboratory in University of Tampere has a research project (http://www.uta.fi/hyper/projektit/mogame/english.html) called MOGAME in which the creation of persistent mobile games are investigated.
Mobility, Games and Communities are all very important ingredients of the digital culture in the future. The union of those elements is going to be vital in the future. Japan is way ahead of European mobile entertainment and the United States has its own ways but also the leading markets. Europe has, in theory, many advantages in mobile entertainment, but as the industry is growing very fast and becomes very attractive there is a danger that international entertainment companies will take the rule as they have done in movie and music business. In FP 6 there should be put emphasis in strengthening the position Europe has in mobile entertainment. The position is not stable. |
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Other comments |
The projects developed were this time concepts which include mobile elements combined with games and community aspects. The four workgroups created during the workshop sessions four unique concepts that all had community, mobility and gaming aspects. |
turku_report.doc