Column: 'Going Mobile: Connecting Vision to Reality at MGC'

In the latest 'Going Mobile' column, Foci Mobile lead analyst Steve Palley discusses last week's Mobile Game Conference in Washington, revealing a fascinating keynote by media gadfly Justin Hall that sought a higher way for cellphone gaming to innovate. In it, Palley explains of the keynote: "Hall isn’t a mobile games dude--his expertise lies at the nexus of entertainment and communications. Mobile’s just going to be the vector for his grand vision, which he presented at his MGC keynote. His term for the idea is “passively multiplayer gaming,” and it basically involves making a persistent MMORPG out of the mundane events of your life. Hall’s argument was a little difficult to follow at his presentation, because he’s what some people like to call an ‘animated speaker’ (think one part Matthew Lesko, the Question Mark Guy, two parts Buckminster Fuller)--but, upon reflection, it makes a lot of sense. According to Hall, we already spend a healthy chunk of time in contact with our friends and contacts over electronic media: there’s e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, World of Warcraft, and so on. Location-based mobile technology can already tell you where you are.... The other piece of Hall’s puzzle is user permission. If you join a passively multiplayer gaming group, you’ll presumably be willing to yield some of your privacy and tell your buddies what you’re up to at any given time, just as we sometimes do in an instant messenger client. After a while, the system will learn your patterns of everyday behavior and become more adept at guessing your activities. So, if you were to tell the system that you’re a smoker, it’ll start to guess that you’re smoking a cigarette when you take a brief trip outside." You can now read the full column on the subject, including plenty more insight regarding the other keynotes at MGC and why Hall's blue-sky concepts are well worth looking into (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).