Bryce et al.
Jo Bryce, Karenza Moore and Jason Rutter
Jo Bryce
Dept of Psychology,
University of Central Lancashire
Karenza Moore & Jason Rutter
Centre for Research on Innovation & Competition (CRIC),
University of Manchester
Symposium Proposal:
Moving Targets are Harder to Hit: Mobile Entertainment in Europe
The mobile phone is now firmly embedded in consumers' everyday lives throughout Europe and in many states has become a near omnipresent technological artefact with ownership outstripping that of landline phones. During this process of diffusion and assimilation the under-thirty market has demonstrated regular and mobile games along with heavy use of SMS are currently being seen (along with premium rate business users) as the potential economic saviours of European mobile telecommunications faced with unusual economic circumstances:
In April 2000 the UK government happily received £22.5 billion from the auctioning of third generation (3G) spectrum licenses for the next generation of mobile phones. Similar auctions shortly afterwards in France and Germany netted the respective governments £12 billion and £32 billion. Despite Finland and Luxemburg allocating licences for free, about £220 per person throughout Europe was spent on the battle to control slices of the mobile phone airwaves.
The problem is that this feeding frenzy has to be paid for. In September last year in Germany Mobilcom came desperately close to bankruptcy and in March this year, Graham Howe, the deputy chief executive of Orange, said that he did not expect 3G services to become a mass-market proposition for another 3 years. As such, throughout Europe mobile operators are searching for new ways to catalyse sales of new handsets, increase the amount consumers spend on profitable data services and, at least partially, recoup these considerable sums of money spent on 3G licenses. 'Mobile entertainment' (ME) - which includes not only gaming but also gambling, adult services, music and location based services - is recognised as the most promising fillip for the industry.
Against this backdrop the session will present three papers which each look at a different aspect of the common socio-economic problems associated with mobile entertainment and gaming. In turn, the papers move from the macro to the micro experience of mobile gaming and its contexts: The first presents an industry and consumer-orientated perspective on mobile gaming which places mobile gaming within the current context of the mobile telecoms industry. The second details new data on mobile gaming drawn from a large scale survey of users of European mobile handset users and provides aggregate-level data on current users demands, perspective and consumption practices. The final paper complements the previous two by exploring the individual and locally-based experience of mobile gamers.
All the papers in this panel draw upon work done by the authors as part of mGain - a European Commission funded project looking at the mobile entertainment industry and culture.
Mobile Gaming: Rivalling the PS2 or Resting with the Dreamcast?
This paper presents a overview of research and forecasts on the markets and consumer organisation for mobile entertainment in Europe. Providing a basis for the empirical work contained in the following two papers this presentation will detail the level of diffusion of mobile phones and services through Europe and provide demographic measures of ME users.
It will offer a workable definition of ME and highlight the way in which mobile gaming fits in to the mobile entertainment schema.
The paper will detail current commercial perceptions of mobile entertainment (ME) users and their levels of involvement in a range of services including gaming and use of messaging services.
Using this data, the paper will highlight weaknesses in the current state of the art in commercial research on ME and draw attention to implicit assumptions which hinder the development of a rigorous perspective on mobile gaming. Further it will use the analysis to compare developments in ME with work previously undertaken on other gaming markets and consumers. Doing so it will highlight a number of conceptual and empirical issues which are likely to play an important role in future analysis of ME.
Measuring the Mobile: New Data on Mobile Gaming
While analysis of large-scale data sets concerning demographics, behaviour and orientation of MMORPG are becoming increasingly common (Yee 2001, 2002) the equally distributed nature of Mobile Entertainment (ME) is still largely unexplored.
From everyday interactions (Murtagh 2002, Taylor and Harper In Press) to consumer foresight and futurology (Moore 2003), local, small scale and qualitative research has explored the diversity of users and uses of mobile phone services and commercial reports (BWCS 2002, MobileYouth 2002) have explored market forecasts. However there is still a profound lack of publicly available multinational information on ME.
This paper seeks to contribute to redressing this gap in game research knowledge by presenting analysis from a Europe-wide questionnaire undertaken by the authors during summer 2003. The web based questionnaire, organised with the support of the European Commission and key ME industry organisations, will provide a significant dataset for analysis which will allow the paper to in turn address:
* Basic demographics of (potential) mobile gamers
* Preferences and consumer spend on ME
* The expectations that consumers hold about current and future gaming and ME opportunities and services
Killing Time: Consumers' Perspective on Mobile Gaming
In contrast to the papers above, and to complement a broadening of the arguments presented in this panel, this presentation will deal with far more local and qualitative-oriented research. It details a series of focus groups undertaken in the UK, Finland, Sweden and France with a range of mobile entertainment users and non-users. The paper focuses on their responses to current gaming opportunities and what they believe mobile gaming may offer them in the future. As such the paper deals with the ways in which participants understand mobile gaming (for example what they deemed to be fun or otherwise), the expression of their concerns about mobile gaming, and the suggestions they give for possible improvements to the mobile gaming experience.
Specifically it highlights the following:
Technical issues:
Contrast between mobile gaming and console/PC gaming options
Technical limitations of mobile phones as gaming devices
Economic Issues:
Level of gaming charges and costs
Clarity of what costs are involved and what is being paid for
Practice Issues:
Remediation and re-presentation of retro games
The embodying of mobile play into everyday routines
All these issues are placed within a developing user context of the tension between the core utility of mobile phones as a communication (talk) device and that of additional functionalities such as gaming.
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