Never mind content search, wot about opponent search?

by: admin Saturday, November 3rd, 2007

Rating: Another possible use for Bluetooth

Writing about mobile gaming recently, yet
again a mobile market soothsayer predicted that multi-user games played in real
time over 3G would soon be massive. Heard it before. Hasn’t happened, yet.

One reason which struck me, was lack of
opponents. How on Earth does your typical spotty youth (because this really is
mainly shoot-em-up stuff) find a worthy opponent?

This sounds just like a job for one of the
social networks. Except it’ll have to be a social site accessible from the
typical handset because it isn’t safe to assume that all mobile phone users
have PC access to the Internet, too.

It’s possible that the games vendors
themselves will set up a mobile site that acts as a kind of multi-player gamers
dating club. However, these will be restricted to just one or a few games from
the same vendor.

Multi-player games will really take off
when those with mobile handsets can compete against more sedentary opponents
sitting at home in front of an X-Box. That’s a facility which, incidentally,
TIM promised to introduce this year but I haven’t discovered whether it
actually happened, yet.

Another possible solution is for dedicated
multi-player gaming sites to spring up, in much the same way as the silly
waterpistol game, Streetwars, has its own site.

Curiously, Bluetooth might play an
important part here. Many mobile games boasts a facility to compete against an
opponent via Bluetooth. And the El Dorado for the dedicated mobile games enthusiast would
be to sit in a crowded rail carriage and play against somebody a few seats
away.

So how would you find such an opponent.
Easy. Lift an idea from Whotooth. It’s a dating service run for gays. You can
find people of the same ilk by changing your handset’s Bluetooth name to a
special code. The code changes weekly. However, for games players you’d just
need to replace the handset’s name with the name of the game you play.

Which is all rather complicated really.
What we really need is a mobile search engine which uses Presence to find which
gamers are online and then matches a player to an opponent whose handset has
exactly the same game loaded.

I’d like to see Google try to do that.