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Experimenting Through Mobile ‘Apps’ and ‘App Stores’

This paper is the culmination of several research projects that created experiential game prototypes that were released on mobile ‘App Stores’. This ground breaking ‘Research in the Wild’ approach led to the development of a number of research methods unique to using such stores for player evaluation. The paper focuses on two novel games that attracted a player base of 1.25 million and extended Don Norman’s concept of Information Appliances introduced in his book ‘The Invisible Computer’ to games. In particular it suggested designing games as a social information appliance connecting friends through social networks. This led to a number of invited keynotes at major conferences: Mobile Game 2.0: The Rise of the Widget, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, USA, February 2008; How do we socialise mobile games? Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, USA, March 2009, Mobile Games as Social Information Appliances, Over the Air, London, September 2009 and Mobile Games as Social Information Appliances or Meme Generators, TEDx North, BBC Manchester, October 2nd 2009. The ‘in the wild’ approach meant they were developed to run on commercial platforms. Thus, we were able to enter them in international innovation competitions for commercial developers with Bombus winning the Nokia Widget competition for 2007 and Four in a Row winning the Vodafone and Nokia Widset Challenge in 2008. These games were considered so innovative that we were invited to demonstrate them at the 4th Annual Nokia Games Summit (2008) in Rome and this was the only academic research to appear alongside games from all the world’s major game developers. It also led to an Extraordinary Achievement Award presented by Nokia for Innovation in Web 2.0 and NFC.

Videos of Four in a Row, Bombus and Paul Coulton’s TEDx talk from the BBC can be found:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jKWS5KRPwM (1,505 views)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHFe_Fk3QZs (886 views)

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxManchester-Paul-Coulton-102