New Form of Gaming

Hello all!

This post is going to be rather short for one reason only: I am about to leave to Disney for the first time ever!! I am quite excited!

Anywho, I was contemplating handheld gaming today. There are two main avenues for handheld games and that is Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP. However, over the past few years a third source of handheld gaming has been on the rise. That source is: the cell phone.

I have an iPhone and have had one since 2007. I love my phone because if nothing else it is there for me when I am bored. With the gaming industry paying more and more attention to cellphone games and as consumers continue to buy them it is apparent that this medium is here to stay.

Now you may cite the lack of gameplay involved in most cell phone games. Most games tend to average around a few hours of gameplay if you are trying to play to completion but most games are designed to be played minutes at a time. Two of the best selling iPhone games are "Cut the Rope" and "Angry Birds". Both of these titles are puzzle games and are very easy to pick up and play and at $1 a piece they are well worth it. I recently bought Fable 3 for $60 and was extremely upset at the result. Sure, I had fun and I played it for about 10 hours but the end result was just dull. I didn't care to go back and perfect my character, I didn't want to collect everything, I didn't even care about the downloadable content that came with it. Now, when I bought "Cut the Rope" I had hours of fun and couldn't stop thinking about it until I had mastered every level. That's the mark of a good game.

Now, I feel I have come up with an appropriate name for this type of gaming and that is: "Toilet Gaming". Essentially, "Cut the Rope" and "Angry Birds" are designed to take the place of the daily paper or the magazine when you are doing your business. You don't see people bringing the NY Times to the toilet anymore because they can pull it up on their smartphones. As I stated above, most iPhone games are designed to be played minutes at a time. How long does the average person spend in the bathroom at any given time? See the perfect correlation?

Now, I still believe there is a market for handheld games and that the cellphones really have no business being in competition with the big names but as far as "Toilet Gaming" goes, they have it on lock down. There really isn't an entry cost because you already have the phone and you can get many of the games for free or at least the lite version free. It truly is a new gaming era!