Forum Nokia Reveals Winners of Mobile Games University Competition 2009

Mobile development community Forum Nokia has announced the winners of its Mobile Games University Competition. Designers from The Upper Austria University and Parsons The New School for Design in the United States earned the top prizes in the competition, which challenged university students to create "the mobile games of tomorrow." Drew Cogbill, Yumi Endo and Rabia Malik from Parsons The New School for Design won the top prize with Weekness, a Flash title that builds gameplay around shared SMS activity. The game focuses on social interaction and communication styles, and features a heavy emphasis on user-generated content. MooLan, the winning title from Michael Holzl and Bernhard Aufreiter at The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, adapts Atari's 1979 arcade game Lunar Lander to current generation mobile phone technology. In MooLan, players guide a lunar module's descent without the use of any touch input -- the phone's accelerometer controls steering, and thrust is controlled by holding a palm or thumb over the device's proximity sensor. "We were really impressed by the standard of entries we received, especially seeing as the students had to develop these concepts in just a few weeks," Nokia's Head of Games Publishing Dr. Mark Ollila. "Games were judged on criteria including entertainment value, creativity and usability. This kind of competition really showcases the raw talent of our next-generation of mobile games developers and provides an insight into the potential of our industry." The winning students earned free trips to the Game Developers Conference, held last week in San Francisco. The teams are additionally invited to visit Nokia's offices at a future date to design and prototype new ideas for mobile games.