Mobile games, and mobile "games".

    Mobility has been a strong draw for some video games for decades now. With Nintendo's immensely successful Game Boy line, a few challengers with middling amounts of success from the likes of Sega and Neo Geo, and the current titans of Nintendo's DS/3DS and Sony's PSP/PS Vita the mobile gaming market has historically been companies (or sections of companies) with gaming as their main focus. Recent years have seen the rise of the smart-phone and the commonization of the touch screen. With these devices in the hands of millions of people, there was suddenly a new platform for game development that didn't rely on gaming as a selling point.

    Many of the games developed for phone gaming are free to play, relying on in game advertisements or micro-transactions to make their money. Micro-transactions are usually purchases for in game items or abilities, most commonly some sort of in game currency. Take, for example, Zynga's Draw With Friends. The game is a touchscreen implementation/imitation/rip-off (depending on your point of view) of Pictionary. One person draws a picture of a thing, and the other person has to guess what it is. While the game starts off with a selection of colors, they are very basic and don't allow for much nuance with the drawings. For just a small amount of money, you can buy more colors, making it easier to accurately draw the thing that you want. Other games, such as WB's recent Batman: Arkham Origins game for iOS, have an “energy” bar. Each level that you play costs in game “energy”, and once you've used it up, you have to wait for it to refill to play more levels. If you want, you can pay money to refill the bar instantly and get playing again (likely to find yourself in that same situation later on). Should you fail a level, the energy you spent will be gone, but you could also pay to try the level again right away. Perhaps the most egregious case of micro-transactions is Real Racing 3, an iOS game with more than $500 of available micro-transactions. RR3 forces players to repair and upgrade their in game vehicles, but also makes them wait for the upkeep to be done or pay to have it done instantly. The only reason that the waiting process was put into the game was to annoy the player to the point of paying. While micro-transactions have the potential to be endlessly profitable, advertisements can also provide significant revenue. Games will often show an ad at the bottom or top portion of the screen, or (more annoyingly) show a full screen ad that only goes away after a certain time frame. Users commonly have the option of living with the ads or paying to get rid of them.

    Smart-phone games are also separating from traditional handheld games in game length. Many smart-phone games are designed to be a quick fix of entertainment. Levels or sessions will last just a few minutes. This makes the games much more suitable for playing in between other parts of life. With such short interaction times, it makes it much easier to play while taking public transportation, while on a lunch break, or even on the toilet. Games with lengthy segments are infrequently seen on smart-phones, but are still very popular on the traditional handhelds.

    Perhaps the strangest shift for the smart-phone game market is the rise of games that are barely games, frequently crossing into chores. The trend started with Facebook games like Farmville. These games (and I hesitate to call them that) have the player gather some kind of resource; the resource is then used to purchase in game items to gather more of that resource. There is rarely an ending to these games, rather, they go on as long as the player wants to keep gathering the resources. These games also lack any kind of losing mechanic. A case could probably be made that these games are so successful because they make the player feel like they're always winning, just at different degrees. The player just keeps on increasing their resource gathering capability until they get bored and move on to something else. For example, Tiny Tower puts the player in control of a building. The player chooses where to put people for both residency and work. The more people are there working, the more money the player gets to build more levels onto the building to get more people there to work and live. The game doesn't have an end objective, but instead has a series of short term goals that have additional rewards. A Star Wars version of the game was recently released titled Tiny Death Star. Even with a pre-built back story to use, there is still no conflict in the game (no attacks from the Rebel Alliance to deal with), and the game handles very much the same. I think the most interesting game of this kind has to be Cookie Clicker. In this game, a player clicks an image of a cookie to produce an in game cookie. The cookies are used to buy items (such as Grandmas, Factories, Portals to another dimension, and even an Antimatter Condensor) to produce more cookies. There is no end to the cookies, there is no end to the game, and it doesn't care. The lack of a winning condition doesn't stop people from cheating either, people have used javascript exploits to gain themselves massive amounts of virtual cookies, enabling them to... I don't even know what.

     All in all, mobile gaming has had some serious changes in the last few years. I think that the increase of people playing games is great, as it helps to reduce the social stigma often attached to playing games. On the other hand, I feel that it has also brought some bad practices into the realm of gaming (the single player Dead Space 3 had micro-transactions for some idiotic reason).

For more on RR3's micro-transactions - http://www.destructoid.com/real-racing-3-infuriates-with-500-of-microtransactions-247411.phtml

For a head trip about Cookie Clicker - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE_nmMK3QbQ