Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

FIGURE 9-9
Tiger Woods PGA Tour Wireless Golf
The growth of the cell phone gaming market is just one reason why it’s so exciting
to see how many new game players will come to experience the excitement of gaming
over time in new ways on very new platforms. This aspect of the game industry provides
for constant excitement and challenge for game developers, but it requires an
equal amount of patience and staying power as new content areas develop around us.
For those who love gaming, there are always new and interesting ways to bring
games to game players. Since game playing itself is central to the human experience,
it’s always inspiring to think about the variety of possibilities for providing new
kinds of gaming to help nurture entirely new kinds of gamers. This area is somewhat
less dependent on hard-edged demographic data, since the wireless audience is so wide.
Opportunities in Wireless
C H A P T E R 9
As you’ve seen in this chapter, there is a wide and growing number of opportunities
to marry up wireless technologies of several types (local versus carrier-based) with
game and entertainment content. Not confined even to cell phone handsets, or any
other specific platform, there are expansion opportunities in wireless where the talents
of game developers can be applied to whole new gaming experiences. In fact, entirely
new content areas are waiting to be defined.
It’s hard to predict exactly where game content will go among all the divergent aspects
of wireless, but one idea is becoming more clear to me every day: wireless games
offer a unique pathway to break out into a much bigger gaming world than ever before
realized. This is a gaming world for developers in which game content is destined
for previously unheard-of numbers of potential gamers. Just as game design learning
among game developers in the industry’s short history has largely been a matter of
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Cell Phones and Wireless Gaming