Cellphone games aren't ringing up sales

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff  |  June 19, 2007

Give people a reliable, robust electronic gadget, and they'll soon start using it to play games. It's a law of nature.

Well, almost. For while most people happily game away on their desktop computers and dedicated game consoles, there's another computer owned by millions that's getting hardly any play at all -- the cellphone. Today's wireless handsets have computing power that compares favorably to the desktop machines of a decade ago, and they feature games that could let users compete with rivals anywhere in the world.

Combine such features in a desktop computer and you get a monster hit like Blizzard Interactive's World of Warcraft, with 8.5 million players worldwide. But create games for cellphones, and you get not a whole lot. According to Telephia Inc. , an outfit that researches these things, fewer than 8 percent of all Americans with cellphones played a game on them last year. This in a country where about 60 percent of us routinely play electronic games of one kind or another. Plainly, something's not working.

The game developers are doing their part. You'll find plenty of games available for most phone handsets. The world's leading digital game company, Electronic Arts Inc., makes dozens of phone games. Given the limited screen size and processing power of a handheld phone, most of these are "casual" games like Bejeweled or electronic bowling -- the kind you play on your office computer during your downtime.

Quite a few of them are multiplayer titles, designed to let you compete against other phone gamers. Thanks to the phone's limitations, the competition is sometimes more theoretical than real. Some auto racing games, for instance, use a "ghosting" technique. Players don't race against each other in real time. Instead, one of them runs through the race course while a central computer records his time. The next player to run the course sees a ghost image of the previous car, and tries to pass it. For the true racing fan, it's a kiss-your-sister experience.

Happily, other casual games offer head-to-head thrills. Disney Interactive makes a shiver-me-timbers slugfest based on its "Pirates of the Caribbean" flicks. As you cruise the Spanish Main in search of plunder, you can engage in real-time artillery duels with other pirate captains. More peaceable gamers may prefer a round of the classic game Tetris, in which players race to assemble an array of oddly shaped falling blocks. A new multiplayer version from Electronic Arts lets phone players compete against each other, then exchange good-natured insults via SMS text messaging.

Yet multiplayer phone gaming lacks the community spirit you find among PC and console gamers. There are no online forums where phone gamers hang out, no gaming "clans" that team up for weekly digital battles. Indeed, after weeks of searching, I found just one avid phone gamer -- Van Davis, a 23-year-old from Charleston, W.Va., who competes in cellphone Tetris under the name VDizzle. "I enjoy the option multiplayer gives us to be able to play some of the best competition around the world," Davis said.

I'd have liked to play against Davis, but he couldn't oblige. He's an Army sergeant assigned to a Special Forces unit, and the cellphone service in Iraq is lousy.

In principle, though, phone gamers worldwide should be able to meet and compete. In practice, there are major barriers. Really good multiplayer gaming requires a fair amount of data bandwidth. But data travels slowly over the standard cellular network, and relatively few people will pay an extra $15 a month or more for a high-speed data plan upgrade.

Also, there are thousands of phone handsets, each containing an array of processor chips of varying power, as well as differing amounts of memory. So games that work fine on one brand of phone can't be installed on another, even if both phones are sold by the same wireless carrier.

And speaking of carriers, creating games for Verizon Wireless phones presents a particular challenge. That's because the company uses a proprietary programming system called BREW, while other cell companies use the more common Java programming system. This gives Verizon near total control over which games can run on its phones, but it freezes out competition from innovative independent game developers, and further fragments an already disintegrated market.

Humans are gamers by nature, and we need good reasons not to play games with our digital gadgets. Unhappily, the cellular industry has obliged.