Mobile phone gaming (a follow-up survey of the mobile phone gaming sector and its users)

Abstract

Over the last decade the importance of network games has seen a tremendous growth. A large part includes the size reduction of the handheld devices. Mobile gaming in a wireless environment and the availability to play games at any place is receiving major importance. Thus more and more games are released in this section (including a huge number of different mobile phone games). Thus, the mobile market offers a wide variety of devices, such as the new handhelds like Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. With the increase in opportunities one must first look at the user behavior to understand how to improve current problems. This paper gives an introduction into the differences of current mobile gaming platforms and their capabilities. Furthermore it features a user survey about individual preferences and social coefficients with unexpected results. The current survey system features a database to handle the huge amount of answers (the predecessor used a polling system). Concluding the results of the previous inquiry, this paper contains a lobby tool based on J2ME and C# to increase the matching mechanisms in a local environment. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.