The 3-Inch User Experience
Microsoft’s gaming division has made much ado over the so-called “10-foot user experience.” People are starting to use their PCs for entertainment in a new way, Microsoft claims. Rather than sitting in front of a 19″ monitor with a keyboard and mouse, they are attaching their PCs to big-screen TVs to watch movies and play simple games.
Since my recent acquisition of a Dell Axim PDA, I’ve become much more interested in the opposite end of the spectrum: the “3-inch user experience.” As I’ve scoured the web for handheld entertainment on my PDA, I’ve been shocked by the poor quality of PocketPC games.
Modern PocketPCs have a reasonable amount of power–mine (Dell Axim x30) is a few years old and has a 624MHz processor and 64MB of memory (including built-in storage). Now, I recognize that the little Intel XScale processor doesn’t get near even a Pentium 1 when it comes to work per cycle, but even so, you can get a lot done in 50ms on one of them. Most even support some type of MMX-style instructions.
Most new PocketPCs come with BlueTooth installed. That means instant multiplayer with anyone in the room with you. And the speed and latency of BlueTooth are pretty impressive.
PocketPCs also have a cool input device–a touchpad. While the buttons are generally useless for playing games, you could reasonably be expected to use a stylus and jog wheel or a stylus and 2 buttons for input.
So why do PocketPC games suck? Perhaps it is mostly the input device? Input has been totally keyboard, mouse, and Nintendo-style controller for so long that it’s difficult to design game mechanics around a new input style. But imagine a fighting game where you scrawl movements on the screen to tell your man what to do. There’s a lot of room for creativity, but nobody seems to have gone for it.
The hardware certainly stacks up well against the GameBoy DS, not counting the dual screens. So the real question is, why hasn’t anyone used the power (and cool input device, and wireless) available in a PocketPC to make something impressive?
I intend to spend one of my first millions starting a company to make real games for PocketPCs.
December 3rd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
The people who buy PocketPC’s are all boring office workaholics who never have any fun themselves but buy Gameboys for their kids to “keep them out of trouble.”
That said, if you ported Drugwars to PockePC and made it multiplayer over bluetooth, you’d be a big hit in conference rooms (until they invent anti-gameware software to ban it).
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:39 pm
So… be the person that makes Drugwars for the PocketPC and do the Anti-gameware software as well. Double the money, double the fun.