Software presentation: The retro mobile gaming database

Abstract

The software presented is reviewed in https://doi.org/10.1177/20501579231155533 Link: http://database.mglab.chass.ncsu.edu/ Mobile games have become woven into the fabric of daily life, as individuals carry their phones with them on the go, squeezing in moments of play or setting aside specific playtimes. Since the release of the iPhone 3G and the App Store in 2008, the number of mobile games has increased substantially, reflecting what Mäyrä (2015) refers to as a growing and increasingly complex genre. Nevertheless, mobile games are not new; they have been around since at least the 1970s, serving as ground-building components of today’s mobile, ludic and digital cultures. Despite their significance, early mobile games pose challenges to research. The earliest mobile gaming platforms, such asl Mattel Football and Nintendo Game & Watch, were handheld electronic consoles. Although many of these games were popular at their time of inception, they are often no longer on the market, making them difficult or expensive to acquire. By the 1990s, mobile phones also became important platforms for mobile gameplay –with games, such as Tetris and Snake, being redesigned for mobile phones. However, these games became unplayable with the release of new operating systems, and, similar to handheld consoles, these mobile phones can be difficult and expensive to acquire. Finally, in the early 2000s, several media artists, startup companies, and academic researchers started to experiment with mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, as interfaces for gameplay (Flintham et al., 2001; Sotamaa, 2002; Wagenknecht & Korn, 2016). However, these early games were often unavailable to the general public because they were restricted to small research or artistic circles. In addition, since the nature of these games was generally ephemeral (i.e., they were played during a specific timeframe in a specific location and then disappeared), it is difficult to find documentation or historical accounts about them, unless a researcher knows specifically how to search for them with exact titles, keywords and creators. Collectively, these challenges limit our knowledge about the history of mobile games and make it difficult to identify correlations between contemporary and early mobile gaming cultures. Software Presentation