An Exploration of the Mobile Gaming Ecosystem from Developers’ Perspective - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 74

availability and af ordability of new mobile devices, and smartphones in
particular, 17 which are still owned only by a minority of users, and on the
ubiquity and af ordability of mobile broadband provided by the next gen-
eration of infrastructures.
However, it can also be concluded that, in the middle term, mobile gam-
ing might confront the main challenge of exhausting the simple model of
being a “time fi ller” even on a smartphone. Some user surveys ef ectively
confi rmed the idea of mobile gaming lying in a “plateau” in terms of adop-
tion before the “revolution” of smartphones and mobile broadband. For
instance, Pew Internet (Horrigan 2009) showed that among U.S. mobile
users gaming had been adopted by 27 per cent of them, a percentage that
had not changed from 2007 to 2009. Nevertheless the same series of reports
(Smith 2010) indicated an increase of usage to 34 per cent in 2010.
The next issue lies in the potential appearance of new types of mobile
games. Two potential main disruptions emerge in the mobile content and
applications domain: the cross-media usage of social networks and the
leverage of context (Feijoó et al. 2009b).
Mobile multiplayer games are, in fact, an early version of a social net-
work for gaming. Social networks add two additional possibilities to the
gaming concept: building a community around the game 18 —which could
extend much beyond it—and viral distribution. The integration of the most
popular Internet social networks, such as Facebook, in the mobile phone
and the emergence of purely mobile social networks, like Twitter, will help
the combination of mobile gaming and social networks. 19 The survey of
Information Solutions Group in January 2011 indicated that 19 per cent of
U.S. and UK mobile gamers played in one or more social networking games
via their phones daily and 37 per cent of them played at least once a week.
In fact, a survey (Lai 2007) run amongst U.S. students revealed that mobile
phone and social networking usage are correlated in terms of intensity and
scope of use. Those people that spend more time on their mobile phones
would spend more time on their use of online social networking. Available
data therefore suggest that consumers do not wish to create new and sepa-
rate social networking profi les for the mobile platform, 20 but instead prefer
to access their existing social networking accounts on the go.
With regard to the use of context in gaming, context characteristics are
typically derived from sensors—both users' bio-parameters and their physi-
cal environment—and from cognitive technologies (Klemettinen 2007). It
is expected that the use of context will expose undiscovered needs and
interactions (Yndurain et al. 2010). For instance, as mobile devices have
rich sensing capabilities, they allow augmenting the real-world commons
with the Internet (Griswold 2007). As an example of this future poten-
tial, users leave traces that can be used—anonymously and/or with privacy
matters solved—as a way of gaming. 21 Mobile augmented reality (MAR),
where information coming from the virtual Internet world is superimposed
on physical objects and browsed through a mobile device, is a concept that