Mobile game guru Greg Costikyan, formerly with Nokia Research but now head of Manifesto Games, highlighted a number of problems facing the mobile games industry, and developers in particular.

- The mobile gaming business model impedes innovation, because consumers buy games based on one line of text, and therefore are drawn to recognized brands (Tetris, licensed games, console titles, etc).

- Games are content, media are containers. There’s lots of game media, and this medium is mobile. So does the mobile game have to be a subset of “the video game”? Probably not.

- Different game styles are suited for different media. Mobile device will always be an inferior video game platform because of the small screen and controls that are designed for telephony, not gaming.

- So how do we bring about the mobile game? It’s not a technological problem — what games are suited to the device?

- A true mobile game style would provide a collection of game mechanics that together produce pleasing player experiences. Some would depend on the unique characteristics of the mobile devices, some exist in a current medium.

- What makes mobile different as a medium? It’s voice-centric, highly personal, it contains a slew of the user’s own information, it’s networked, it’s ubiquitous (both always on and always with the user), it’s usable anywhere and it almost always now has a camera.

- But, almost none of the above characteristics can be used by mobile games. No simultaneous voice and data connections, and J2ME (for good reason) can’t access phone and date book information.

- The phone is networked, but it’s hard to use because of high latency, the JAR model makes it hard to add new levels and content to a game on the fly, and it’s also hard to connect services without a server.

- Location-based services still really don’t work well. Cell-based locating is too inaccurate, and GPS is too slow and doesn’t work in dense urban areas.

- APIs for cameras that are useful to games developers are few and far between.

- To enable mobile true mobile games, technology providers must figure out how to let developers use the features already available on devices, how to use them better and to make sure they’re as widely developed — and as standardized across manufacturers — as possible.

- Voice is the biggest example. Player communication is vital to every multiplayer game, from cards to MMOGs. Online services in the 80s noticed that just adding text chat to classic board games spurred usage.

- “Single-player games are a wast of devices built for human communication.” (A quote from my former colleague Justin Hall on TheFeature)

- How to make voice a reality? Ensure deployment of OMA PoC as soon as possible, and further examine VoIP in the context of gaming.

- People should be able to use their phone books, which is their “buddy list”. Shouldn’t have to create a new list for gaming. Create ways to for people to play their friends (ie sending an SMS if they’re not online), and to make people they’ve met online “friends” out of game.

- It’s in everybody’s interest to make superdistribution a reality. If someone wants to send a game to their friend, and their friend wants to buy it, it should happen — regardless of if they’re on different carriers or using devices from different vendors.

- Networking has to improve, and much of that is dependent on operators’ configurations — reducing latency isn’t a high priority because gaming is one of the only applications that needs it.

- Developers should have easy ways to both add new content to games (new levels etc) and pull content from a user’s phone (say they have a personal avatar).

- The success of mobile games has been based on cross-vendor, cross-operator solutions, like J2ME. But technology doesn’t yet let developers take advantage of the things about mobile devices that make them different from any other platform.

- Presumably, the ideal mobile game will be one that won’t translate well to other platforms.