(Originally posted on
The Feature on November 18, 2003, although it has been slightly edited and updated for clarity)

Part one in an occasional series - experiences trying to cross over Computer, Console and Online Games into the mobile space.

My first foray into journals on this website is, I’m afraid, going to consist of a complaint directed against the mobile industry as a whole. I’m going to talk about what I perceive as missed opportunities in the mobile space, things I’ve personally experienced.

The first is going to be the ‘killer app’ for mobile gaming.

There has been a lot of talk over many years about cross-platform gaming. By this I mean games where the participants don’t have to be on the same computer or console, but can interact either directly or indirectly using their own platform of choice.

iD Software and Activision almost pulled it off with Quake 3 – there was a version for the PC which was (and still is) extremely popular as an online game (remember Quake? It essentially created the entire online games market as a mass-market concept). Sega liked the idea and arranged for the game to be ported to their Dreamcast console, including the online game play element.

For the first time there was the possibility of both PC and console players co-existing in the same virtual space in an online game (this is obviously quite apart from interaction through chat rooms, or through text-based game play where the requirements are much lower).

However in their infinite wisdom Sega decided to block interaction between PC and Dreamcast players competing against each other – in hindsight probably a good idea given the different skill levels and control setups for the two versions of the game.

Modern consoles like the Playstation 2 and the Xbox permit online gaming, however they do not allow interaction between different types of console. Microsoft have explicitly walled off all Xbox Live! games to prevent interaction between the Xbox version of an online game and the PS2 or PC version – and Microsoft will not allow a developer to write an Xbox Live! game that interacts with anything other than other Xbox’s.

Quite apart from world of fast-paced shooters beloved by PC developers and driving games favoured by console developers when it comes to online play, the world of Massively Multiplayer Games is one that just cries out for cross-platform interaction.

Whilst most online games are based around the peer to peer or non-persistent state game styles, massively multiplayer games offer an additional inducement to play - thousands of other people to play against and interact with.

While most MMO games manage to provide a consistent consensual universe for people to participate in, they also generally suffer from only a veneer of persistence, with the player’s avatar only appearing within the game world whilst the player is logged in, and any persistence n actions are generally limited to houses or land owned or controlled by the player.

The large MMO games like Anarchy Online, Asheron’s Call 2, Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars Galaxies all approach persistence by limiting persistence to player-built items, or player-controlled land. In all but Anarchy Online, other players cannot interfere with or affect another player’s owned objects – so persistence is only in the eyes of the player.

Back in January 2003 I came across a massively multiplayer game that had true persistence – your player avatar (or in this case avatars) remained in the game world after you disconnected, and other players could directly affect and even completely destroy you while you were not playing. This was half the fun – you never knew when you logged on the next time whether or not someone had found your empire and wiped you out.

The game includes a traditional 3D view for the pretty graphics demanded of a PC game, but also included a strategic view, which although available in 3D was effectively a 2D representation of your entire empire, all your assets, all the items you owned. And you could play the entire game through this top-down view.

The ideal of course in this sort of game is you either stay logged in at all times, or you sign up for one of the alert services so you would find out if you were being attacked. These alerts were limited to email.

By now I hope you’re on the same page as me, and are asking why you couldn’t get SMS alerts – and some of you will have taken it to the next step and asked why you couldn’t control the game through your mobile.

The absolute ideal in this sort of game would be to be able to instantly react if you get attacked by another player. As it stands you can only do this once you get back to your PC and log back in to the game, even if the game has sent you a nice SMS alert telling you that you are being wiped out. But what if you got an alert on your mobile that you were being attacked and you could use your mobile to connect to the game and defend yourself?

This goes beyond cross platform game play, and moves into the realm of cross-platform control of game play, using your PC and your mobile to control the same items in the same persistent universe.

And here’s where the apathy of the mobile industry comes into play.

There is a Java-based client design that allows anyone with a Java-enabled mobile handset to connect to and interact with their empire in real time, and make changes that are reflected for the thousands of other players in the same game, changes which are persistent and will still be in place if you close the mobile connection and re-open a PC connection. Changes that can be made using the mobile and will appear instantly, and in real time on the PC screen, or vice versa.

On top of this the game is subscription based, so players have to pay a monthly fee to play the game at all, and with a mobile version (which is not mandatory) you gain not only a download fee for the Java client, but ongoing subscription revenues and (for mobile carriers) data carriage fees.

But where’s the apathy you ask? It was offered to a very large mobile carrier six months ago. They loved the idea and had plans for it to appear on the N-Gage at launch. Then they totally ignored it, as did every other carrier that was approached. So the mobile version never appeared although the PC version is now available in game stores UK-wide, and will shortly be launched in the US, and console versions have been planned (except Xbox because of Microsoft’s insistence on their walled garden).

Despite blithe promises of gaming heaven on mobiles, the holy grail of online gaming seems to be eluding everyone, and I find it so surprising that I am often lost for words.

Throughout these six years I’ve seen many people talk about tapping in to the online games market and making it truly mass market, and what is more mass market than a mobile? It really does astonish me, and no-one I have ever spoken to has ever been able to give me a reason why it is so hard to take a concept like this and actually produce it in the mobile space.

For six years, thousands of online games players have been telling me they want to be able to play against as many other people as possible, that they love the idea of cross platform games, and they love the idea of being able to respond immediately in a persistent universe game even if they’re not at their PC or console, and no-one seems to be able to get it together enough to do it.