Books

Books

Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces (2009), by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko. "The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games."

Strategic Mobile Design: Creating Engaging Experiences, New Riders Pub. (2008) by Joseph Cartman and Richard Ting. As described on Amazon.com: "This book gives anyone interested in mobile campaigns, both client-side and production-side, the knowledge to approach a mobile project with a cohesive strategy. The book presents a holistic view of the mobile ecosystem design/technology/marketing/business/build, with enough information to get one started with a project of this nature."

A Game that Surrounds You, Birkhauser Basel, (2007), by M. Struppek and K. Willis. "The 2002 launch of the game Botfighters — a mobile version of Counter-Strike (Valve 2001) — marked the beginning of the invasion of urban space by real-time location-based mobile games. In Botfighters, a mobile device becomes a weapon, and the real urban landscape is transformed into a battlefield for a computer supported action adventure. To play the game, a player needs to visit the Botfighters website and create a robot warrior character, which, along with the mobile device, enables him to slip into the gamespace."

Digital Storytelling: A Creator's Guide to Interactive Entertainment (2004), by Carolyn Handler Miller. "Create engrossing, interactive entertainment products from development-to-production."

2010

Mobile Youth Around the World

Nielsen’s 2010 whitepaper on Mobile Youth Around the World reveals that most young people with mobile phones chose their own device. In fact, across all the countries surveyed, only 16 percent of young people reported that their parents selected their mobile phone. Price was the most common consideration among youth in selecting a mobile phone, though that is true among other age groups, too. Youth aged 15 to 24 in all countries surveyed put price as the first purchase driver, with the exception of Russian youth, 21 percent of whom placed design/style first. (Some grown-ups care about design, too. Around 14 percent of Brazilian adults say design/style is the most important consideration, compared to seven percent of U.S. adults.)