Nokia: 'Our remit is to push N-Gage to the limit'
Mark Ollila talks innovation, location and augmented reality
The N-Gage sales charts may be dominated by Tetris, Monopoly and World Series of Poker, but that isn't stopping Nokia from looking for the next innovative thing in mobile gaming.
In fact, that's a core part of Mark Ollila's job. Armed with the slightly unwieldy job title of 'Director of Technology & Strategy and Head of Nokia Games, Publishing, Games', his role is to forge links between the innovative tech people in one part of Nokia, and the games teams.
Next week at GDC, some of this technology will be shown off at Nokia's booth.
It includes Nokia Image Space - a service mashing up people's photos, videos and sounds with their location and movement information and their social networks.
It's come out of the Nokia Research Center, which Ollila says has been the starting point for several technologies that have made it into N-Gage.
"On the publishing side, a lot of our game playability and usability testing methods come from NRC," he says.
"Within the games publishing team, our remit is to push the N-Gage platform to the limit and share best practices with the industry, trying these new ideas and concepts out and sharing the knowledge."
Something like Image Space fits neatly into this - Nokia's N-Gage execs have been talking openly about incorporating location, mapping and presence into games for a while now, not to mention user-generated content.
"It's fascinating to look at rewarding and sharing that content, tying in the location aspects and figuring out how you can bring it into a game," says Ollila.
"We're generating hundreds and hundreds of concepts at the moment internally, going through our innovation process. We're looking for location-orientated ideas, or around people and communities, or showcasing the platform's capabilities, or stuff that is more cross-service orientated."
A game like Dance Fabulous, due out for N-Gage later this year, fits into that last category, since it will tie N-Gage in with Nokia's Music Store.
It's clear that Nokia is giving Ollila plenty of latitude to think beyond the traditionally accepted limits of mobile games. Indeed, some of his thoughts chime perfectly with what's happening in the social gaming world.
"Can you do a game as a service, for example?" he asks. "So it's the continual adjustment and fine-tuning as the community is coming in and going out, rather than a single product that you ship. It's something that's very much alive and makes you as a player want to contribute to it. So exploring this idea of games as a service or a platform is really interesting."
Getting location into more N-Gage games is clearly another current preoccupation for Ollila and his team, as he explains.
"We're working on two pre-productions in location-based games at the moment, looking at playing with maps," he says.
"The question is the scale of it. Is the fact that the player is in London all you need to know, or do they actually need to be running around the streets and interacting with people? We're certainly exploring that on the games publishing side."
By way of illustration - although it's not one of those two current projects - Ollila talks about some research into pervasive gaming that Nokia was involved with in the past on a game called Mythical Mobile.
It included features using players' locations, with one example being that to cast a spell, a group of players needed one person in North America and another in Europe to be logged in at the same time.
"They'd need to sort out a time when they executed the spell together," he explains. "It was using location to tie into the context of the actual gameplay. It's those kinds of things that we're looking to understand and learn from."
Although the GDC booth will be showing off Image Space and some other Research Center technologies to developers, Ollila says Nokia is as keen to hear developers' out-there ideas too.
"We're very much open to the different ideas and concepts that developers are coming up with," he says. "The booth is going to be about conversations: 'Gee, you're doing this? Well it can tie in here...' It's a great opportunity to hold innovative conversations with people at the show."
source
The N-Gage sales charts may be dominated by Tetris, Monopoly and World Series of Poker, but that isn't stopping Nokia from looking for the next innovative thing in mobile gaming.
In fact, that's a core part of Mark Ollila's job. Armed with the slightly unwieldy job title of 'Director of Technology & Strategy and Head of Nokia Games, Publishing, Games', his role is to forge links between the innovative tech people in one part of Nokia, and the games teams.
Next week at GDC, some of this technology will be shown off at Nokia's booth.
It includes Nokia Image Space - a service mashing up people's photos, videos and sounds with their location and movement information and their social networks.
It's come out of the Nokia Research Center, which Ollila says has been the starting point for several technologies that have made it into N-Gage.
"On the publishing side, a lot of our game playability and usability testing methods come from NRC," he says.
"Within the games publishing team, our remit is to push the N-Gage platform to the limit and share best practices with the industry, trying these new ideas and concepts out and sharing the knowledge."
Something like Image Space fits neatly into this - Nokia's N-Gage execs have been talking openly about incorporating location, mapping and presence into games for a while now, not to mention user-generated content.
"It's fascinating to look at rewarding and sharing that content, tying in the location aspects and figuring out how you can bring it into a game," says Ollila.
"We're generating hundreds and hundreds of concepts at the moment internally, going through our innovation process. We're looking for location-orientated ideas, or around people and communities, or showcasing the platform's capabilities, or stuff that is more cross-service orientated."
A game like Dance Fabulous, due out for N-Gage later this year, fits into that last category, since it will tie N-Gage in with Nokia's Music Store.
It's clear that Nokia is giving Ollila plenty of latitude to think beyond the traditionally accepted limits of mobile games. Indeed, some of his thoughts chime perfectly with what's happening in the social gaming world.
"Can you do a game as a service, for example?" he asks. "So it's the continual adjustment and fine-tuning as the community is coming in and going out, rather than a single product that you ship. It's something that's very much alive and makes you as a player want to contribute to it. So exploring this idea of games as a service or a platform is really interesting."
Getting location into more N-Gage games is clearly another current preoccupation for Ollila and his team, as he explains.
"We're working on two pre-productions in location-based games at the moment, looking at playing with maps," he says.
"The question is the scale of it. Is the fact that the player is in London all you need to know, or do they actually need to be running around the streets and interacting with people? We're certainly exploring that on the games publishing side."
By way of illustration - although it's not one of those two current projects - Ollila talks about some research into pervasive gaming that Nokia was involved with in the past on a game called Mythical Mobile.
It included features using players' locations, with one example being that to cast a spell, a group of players needed one person in North America and another in Europe to be logged in at the same time.
"They'd need to sort out a time when they executed the spell together," he explains. "It was using location to tie into the context of the actual gameplay. It's those kinds of things that we're looking to understand and learn from."
Although the GDC booth will be showing off Image Space and some other Research Center technologies to developers, Ollila says Nokia is as keen to hear developers' out-there ideas too.
"We're very much open to the different ideas and concepts that developers are coming up with," he says. "The booth is going to be about conversations: 'Gee, you're doing this? Well it can tie in here...' It's a great opportunity to hold innovative conversations with people at the show."
source
Posts
No comments: