Gaming devices like the Nintendo DS or the Playstation Portable are designed to enjoy gaming on tour. But how much does the gaming experience on tour (e.g. on public transportation) differ from playing at home? How do the surroundings change the experience? What kind of games or genres are suited best for the mobile gaming context?
To put in other terms: Did you already play Metroid Prime: Hunters on a bus tour? Or tried to master Dr. Kawashima`s Brain Training in a train filled with school kids? Well, I tried both and these experiences lead me to the idea of a short study focused on mobile gaming experiences.
Two of our students (Christian & Sebastian) put both the NDS and the PSP to the test: For each console 3 representative games were chosen. All games were played by a randomized group of subjects in a quiet and comfortable home environment and another randomized group during a ride with the bus. We compared the high-scores and the time to reach a certain goal and got some interesting results.
In general, the subjects in the comfortable and quiet surrounding out-performed the subjects in the mobile gaming scenario in all tested games which is likely the effect of the typical enviromental effects of a bus ride like shaking, noises or bad lighting. But the impact of these enviromental effects differed a lot from game to game and that`s why we compared the games and their results among themselves.
Both racing games (Mario Kart & Wipeout Pure) had only a 4% difference in time-to-goal performance while Tetris-playing subjects already differed by 14% between both surroundings; Tekken generated 16% difference. Much more significant differences – even within the game – appeared while playing Dr. Kawashima`s Brain Training: All disciplines generated different performances with “calculation” being the one which suffered the most under the bus ride (+90%), followed by “drawing” lines (+74%) and “memory tasks” (+33%). We also did focus groups afterwards to get more qualitative feedback about the kind of problems the subjects had but i will come back to that later in another short report here at my blog.
What do we learn from this study? Never play Dr. Kawashima on public transportation if you want to lower you brain age. Stick to racers or other button-based games, the touch pen interaction is error-prone if the public transportation vehicle shakes too much. Even more, games which need a specific lighting like Wario Ware Snapped! will work only half of the time. So chose wisely what games you want to take with you on the next bus ride. Sadly, not every game designed for a mobile gaming console works in a mobile gaming context.