Monday, March 05, 2007

Mobile-Gaming Madness

Would your cell phone be more fun if the industry adopted standards?

By Rachel Ross

Phone fun: At the University of Southern California’s GamePipe Labs, students learn about the unique challenges of making games for mobile phones. One USC team developed a game called Battle Boats (above), in which players try to move their ships across the board without hitting mines. Credit: GamePipe Labs USC School of Engineering

At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, programmers will discuss the unique challenges posed by portable devices: the screens are small, wireless connections can be flaky, and processing power is limited. But the biggest complaint of many in the industry is the lack of standards.

"The mobile-phone environment unfortunately has been driven by the service providers, and they have different demands for what technologies can and can't be used," says Michael Zyda, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California and director of its GamePipe Labs. GamePipe conducts research on video games and teaches students how to program games for portable devices. Zyda says that in order to meet the needs of service providers and phone manufacturers, mobile-game developers have to reconfigure--or port--a given game for several different software environments.

"It's a crazy era, much like the early days of computing, when each manufacturer was making their own operating system and there weren't standards for interoperability," Zyda says. "It's like the Tower of Babel with respect to interoperability."

Christy Wyatt, a vice president at Motorola who coordinates the company's developer program, agrees that the lack of standards can be a problem. "Overwhelmingly, we hear that the major challenge for the game community is platform fragmentation," she says, adding that one developer recently told her he was supporting 500 different platforms. "If you change even a small thing on the platform, it's a whole new test cycle of them."

Hardware differences can also present problems. For example, it's essential that a game player feel comfortable with the physical controls she uses to play a given game, but button placement can be very different from one phone to the next. Some use more-traditional phone dial pads with a couple of additional buttons on the sides, while many smart phones feature a typewriter-style button layout. Touch screens, such as the one on Apple's upcoming iPhone, present even more of a challenge.

Joe Ariganello, senior product manager of games for Sprint Nextel, says developers who make games for the company have to ensure that the software works with a couple dozen of their top phones. If a game is licensed to another wireless carrier as well, then there's even more porting involved because that carrier will likely have different hardware and software configurations. For this reason, some game makers outsource the porting and focus on creating new content.

Zyda believes that the industry should adopt the mobile version of the open-source operating system Linux as a standard to alleviate the porting problem. While there are other open-source platforms for mobile devices, Zyda thinks Linux is the best choice because there are already lots of programmers who are familiar with its intricacies. "It's the only one with a lot of traction," he says.