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Opinion: We need more asynchronous multiplayer mobile games

It's good to take turns

Opinion: We need more asynchronous multiplayer mobile games

While writing a feature the other day for the main Pocket Gamer site about multiplayer iPhone games, I started to wonder whether real-time online games will really be a big deal going forward.

Sure, iPhone is more than capable of real-time multiplayer gaming over the network.

The developers of racing game Raging Thunder just released an update enabling it, Gameloft's TV Show King lets you compete against players around the world, and Live Poker has you bluffing rivals on iPhone and Facebook alike.

Will the multiplayer features of these games prove popular? That remains to be seen. It's clear that there are some technical barriers still.

Raging Thunder's developer Polarbit is stressing that its multiplayer is very much at the beta stage, and is inviting players to download free software to run their own servers. Meanwhile, TV Show King Online has taken a dislike to some port setting on my home wi-fi router.

But actually, the multiplayer iPhone game I'm more excited about is less high-profile – a title called Chess With Friends from Newtoy Inc.

Not because I'm any good at chess (I'm not), but because it's taking a different slant on the multiplayer thing. It's entirely asynchronous – you make your move, then your opponent makes theirs whenever they're online.

It could be a matter of seconds, or a couple of days, but the key thing is that you don't have to be online playing together at the same time.

Obviously, this suits a turn-based game like chess, but it's proving popular. Newtoy says that more than 60,000 moves have been made in thousands of games since the game went live on the App Store.

It's not a new idea, of course. You don't need me to tell you about the popularity (until it got squished by the legals) of Scrabulous on Facebook, a game that revolved around asynchronous matches between friends that could take days (or weeks) to play out.

Other games have followed suit, whether taking the turn-based approach (Distinctive Developments' Anytime Pool is a good example of this), or going down the road of setting challenges for friends to compete against in their own time (Bumper Stars, Bowling Buddies, or indeed most Playfish games).

The point is, you're playing multiplayer games but without the multiple players having to be online at once – a model tailor-made for the habits and patterns of mobile usage.

There's signs that mobile games firms have twigged. Take EA Mobile's Spore Origins, which let you build up your Spore then send it off to battle those of other players online – but via server-side technology that ensured they didn't have to be online at the same time.

Indeed, you could hark back to Nokia's Pocket Kingdom on the first N-Gage for an early example of asynchronous mobile multiplayer.

We need more of this kind of thing. It's a way to make the most of mobile phones' innate connectivity, while getting around those pesky issues of network lag and handset fragmentation.

If you can tie people's real-life friend networks into it –something that's happening with the entry of social games firms like SGN and Zynga into the iPhone market – so much the better.

It'll happen. Distinctive has made no secret of the fact that it hopes to bring Anytime Pool to mobile sooner rather than later with its multiplayer elements intact, and other developers are also working on innovative ideas in this area.

Real-time multiplayer clearly has a role to play on iPhone (and N-Gage, Android and, yes, Java) going forward. But I have a hunch that the first truly breakout mobile multiplayer game will be asynchronous in nature.

Until then, I better brush up on my chess openings.


Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)