Game theory

It’ll be Android vs. iPhone in a classic game of . . .

Sometime around 1980, I found out I was a video game junky. I’m not sure if it started with the first time I saw a Pac Man machine or with my old friend the Atari 2600. I know I probably fed arcade machines thousands of quarters. But I think the game I probably spent the most time with in my childhood was King’s Quest. I must have spent hundreds of hours typing in commands like “Get in bucket” and “Climb tree.” I even got to the point of downloading a walk-through off some BBS. A walk-through in 1984? Yes, a walk-through. Now there are entire Web sites dedicated to walk-throughs.

Even back then there was a fundamental difference between PC gamers and console gamers. Even though many people owned both and still do, they usually favored one over the other, depending on theirs preference for control and game type. During the Quake 3 days, there were servers that brought Dreamcast console players together with PC gamers. The results were ugly. The console players couldn’t keep up, and the Dreamcast maps looked more like those of Sonic the Hedgehog than the ruined landscape of the Quake universe.

Today, a new breed of “gamer” is on the rise. And the same way PC gamers and console gamers flamed each other in the past, they will flame this new gamers, their devices, and their games. These gamers are smart-phone gamers.

According to the market research firm iSuppli, mobile phones equipped to play games and other forms of electronic entertainment vastly outnumber their rival dedicated gaming platforms. In 2010, factory unit shipments of game-capable mobile phones are forecast to reach 1.27 billion, up 11.4% from 1.14 billion last year.

But comparing cell phones and consoles is a bit unfair. A fairer comparison would be laptops able to play games vs. smart phones able to do the same.

Smart gaming?

Are the games there today? No. Games have been part of cell phones since cell phones had screens. Today you can find a host of games, from retro conversions on classic arcade and FPSs to MMOs. But many of the games still lack the level their forefathers possessed. I’ve never invested more than a few hours on a game on my smart phone vs. 50 hours to complete many single-player console and PC games. (I think people spend more time on Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook.)

Is the technology there for smart phones? Some of the newer smart phones are following the model that PC and consoles laid out for them. From the advent of the DVD drive, PCs became home entertainment centers. So did consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3. Consoles even had Internet access in 1998 on the Sega Dreamcast. Well, consoles are just computers anyway … and so are smart phones. The smart phone’s biggest limitation right now is storage space.

The main difference is while not everyone owns a gaming console of the same type, cell phones and smart phones are more widespread. It will eventually come down to what games are available on your smart-phone platform: Android vs. iPhone. Just like the unending war of PCs vs. Mac. Is it just me, or do you sense the pattern too?

Bryan DeLuca

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