Enhancing Player Experience in MMORPGs with Mobile Features

This paper examines how massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) can incorporate mobile phone features to deepen player engagement and extend the reach of these games beyond the PC. Its central argument is that mobile devices, given their constant connectivity, social function, and sensitivity to real-world context, can support pervasive gameplay, and it proposes six categories through which this can happen: communication access, event notifications, asynchronous gameplay, synchronous player-to-player interaction, passive participation, and parallel reality. The authors frame the work as qualitative research intended to inform game design rather than to serve as marketing research.

The findings were gathered through six focus groups held in February and March 2005, comprising three face-to-face sessions in Finland, one in-game session, one virtual chat room session, and a developer session conducted over voice-over-IP. Twenty players aged 17 to 40 participated, with roughly 13 percent female, and two additional developers contributed by e-mail. The authors acknowledge that the sample consisted of experienced MMORPG players, which may skew results, and that online focus groups made it hard to observe silent participants.

Across the categories, players and developers responded most favorably to features that are optional, controllable, and peripheral to core gameplay, such as access to in-game chat and mobile auction or trading systems. Event notifications and parallel-reality features drew the most varied and frequently negative reactions, with concerns centered on intrusiveness, privacy, and the erosion of real life for hardcore players. Younger participants were more receptive to parallel-reality concepts than older ones. The authors conclude that event notifications and parallel reality warrant further study, and they plan to test selected features in prototypes through the Integrated project on Pervasive Gaming.