As I was sitting thinking about the kind of gaming experience that I would love to have on Symbian^3 and the Nokia N8, one particular idea hit me and I couldn’t remove it from my head for a few days. We have TV-Out, DLNA certified devices, WiFi or Bluetooth multiplayer gaming, HDMI out, and quick processors with graphic acceleration. What do we get if we mix all of that in a platform that can easily take out the multiplayer and the gaming console scene?
MultiScreen gaming. Follow me around so I explain the concept and if you like it, vote for it in the Make My App competition.
Imagine a friend drops by your house and you’re dying to share with him the latest Scrabble, Go-Fish, Football, Monopoly, Naval Fight or One person shooter game you’re addicted to. You have bought the game on your phone from the Ovi Store, so right now you can either let him play the game on your device or hook it to the TV and let him play alone. If the game supports Multiplayer, he has to have bought the game himself in order for the both of you to compete and there’s no use for hooking one device to the TV still.
But what if there was an easier way for you to share the game with him and play against him, using your device and the TV?
The way I see it is you send your friend an invitation so he can download the full game for free on his own phone (but his version is limited to Multiplayer only). This is the same as you lending him your second controller for your console game, except it’s not consoles here, it’s Symbian devices. Your device is the main one and it can connect to the TV via HDMI or DLNA, and to your friend’s device via WiFi or Bluetooth.
You launch the game. Now you have the game itself on the TV and two glorified controllers in both of your hands. These are full touchscreen devices and can be used for much more than tilting and making some moves. Since every person is holding their own phone, there’s room to use that for many game-related functions.
- Scrabble: the phone shows each player their tile rack while the TV shows the Scrabble board.
- Go Fish: the phone shows each player’s cards while the TV shows the dealing table, the reaming cards rack, and the already finished series.
- Football: the whole game is shown on the TV while each phone lets the user control his player moves, plot several moves in advance, change his squad’s organization, prepare player switches.
- Monopoly: the TV shows the board while the device lets you view your properties, money and control them.
- Naval Fight: the full game progress is shown on the TV while specific views for each player along with a way to analyze possible enemy ship locations are only on the phone.
- One Person Shooter: it’s the same concept. The full game is displayed on the TV, whereas the specific controls for each player, their weapons, their location and progress is only on each player’s phone.
Do you imagine yourself playing this sort of game on your Symbian device? Is this something that excites you and promises a great prospect in terms of game choice abundance and quality? Would you like for Nokia to create a full developer API that would allow this sort of games to be built easily by developers? If you do, don’t forget to check and vote for the idea on the Make My App contest so it sees the light of day.
