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This chapter focuses on the mobile gaming trend, along with the entertainment quotient of mobile phones. The introduction of the Snake game in mobiles by Nokia in 1997 was the start of the mobile game era, with the Asia Pacific region leading the world toward mobile gaming. The chapter presents a survey according to which women are likely to play an equal amount of mobile games as men, although there is a difference in download data. It shows an increase in the popularity of mobile gaming among people of every age group, although mobile gamers are more likely to be from a Hispanic, black, or Asian background. The chapter presents different categories of gamers, including hardcore gamers, causal gamers, and social gamers. Mobile TV, a new entertainment platform, is being tested on the commercial level, although people feel that it would hamper the primary use of the mobile, which is social interaction.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim examines how a growing number of top-grossing and popular mobile game titles are extensions of larger media franchises that also stem from other media properties. He posits the licensed mobile game as a flexible, promotional paratext within Japanese video game and anime transmedia franchises such as Dragon Ball and Final Fantasy. As such, his chapter considers the increasingly important role of ancillary, low-budget texts and how they can quickly adapt to changing market conditions to effectively monetize audience interests.

This chapter discusses the idea of “cadence,” continuous updates to games. Cadence is much more useful to mobile games than it would be to games like Chess or Scrabble. Bogost talks about the way that allowing updates on a game like Words with Friends offers endless possibilities for the game creators to alter the game in a way that would make it most successful. Bogost also incorporates analyses of other games by the same company, like Draw Something and FarmVille. He discusses what made/makes these games popular and how in particular Words with Friends has the potential to go on being popular for a long time.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts. It discusses mobile game affordances; the tenets of mobile game design; the disconnect between students’ experiences of media and technology in school and in their lives outside of school; and the future of mobile learning games.

This chapter traces the development of handheld games. The discussions include Mattel’s release of its first popular handheld game—Football—in 1977; the emergence of portable consoles; the popularity of Nintendo’s Game Boy and the Nintendo DS; the Tamagotchi; Floodgate Studios’ Mo-Pets; the advent of cell phone games; location-based games; and alternate reality games.

Mobile games are deeply integrated into players’ everyday lives. In this chapter, we introduce methods such as paper prototyping and diary studies that consider both the unique form-factor of mobile touchscreen devices and the need to understand users’ context for gameplay. We consider the constraints of lab-based research for mobile games, and discuss strategies for conducting mobile studies in and out of the lab.

This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS technology to construct virtual spaces ripe for playful exploration as well as economic exploitation. In focusing on Nintendo’s sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase all signs of Japanese “cultural odor” from its games, scholarly appraisals of the Pokémon franchise have largely followed the traditional reduction of race to an explicit visual or linguistic feature of games. This chapter instead uses Pokémon GO’s seemingly inadvertent exposure of U.S. racial fault lines as an opportunity to explore how race is not erased but rather embedded in the game’s disorienting technology. It reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and atomic history that lurk beneath the game screen. The chapter argues that this illusion of ahistorical universality crucially buttresses the fantasy of Pokémon GO as a truly “free” game, masking the invasive and dehumanizing data mining structures that make it enormously profitable for its developers.

This chapter first describes the characteristics of award-winning video games. It then turns to the problem of transfer. Transfer is the task of taking knowledge or skills learned in one context and applying them to another. For example, a simple transfer might involve students learning addition through word problems in class later applying that skill in the grocery store. People in general are quite bad at transfer. The chapter considers the following learning traditions which can help promote transfer: collaborative learning, problem-based learning, situated learning, computer-supported problem solving. It also discusses the emergence of mobile learning games.

This chapter describes how mobile games can adapt to the constraints of classrooms through the use of participatory simulations. It discusses the principle of technology adapting to the classroom, where games fit into the classroom and allow a more natural flow of the class; the design of “lightweight” technologies; and the design of games that are both engaging and educational.

This chapter discusses schools and education reform, and how technology fits into the academic world. It considers the perception that schools in the United States are unable to provide students with the necessary skills to meet the demands of the global economy. It identifies the information technology competencies (FITness) that are critical to being prepared for the modern world, both in the workplace and out. The discussion then turns to how mobile games can help develop FITness skills.

This chapter describes the use of role play and collaboration in mobile games. The discussions focus on game known as Outbreak @ the Institute, which combines the virus modeling of the Virus game, along with the public health and role-playing aspects of the augmented reality games. Players of Outbreak @ the Institute participated in a fictional scenario: the outbreak of a new form of avian influenza, or bird flu, in a university campus.

This chapter begins with an overview of the virtual pet industry. It describes the rise of the Tamagotchi in the late 1990s and the emergence of online virtual pet sites. It then discusses the development of Palmagotchi (cute Palm)—a simple educational game played occasionally over long periods of time outside of class, connecting back to classroom content through discussion and data analysis. Palmagotchi draws upon analogies to Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos. Players maintain families of birds and islands of flowers while considering issues in genetics, ecology, and evolution to best maximize their chances for survival.

This chapter examines performative play, where games themselves do work. Performative gameplay describes mechanics that change the state of the world through play actions themselves, rather than by inspiring possible future actions through coercion or reflection. It can be found in mixed-reality games that couple computational interaction to real-world interaction in deliberate ways. These games include mobile games, ubiquitous games, pervasive games, and alternate reality games (ARGs). The Grocery Game, in which the goal is to reduce one’s family grocery costs as much as possible, is an example of mundane performative play.