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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.

• The paper proposes six categories through which mobile phone features can extend MMORPGs into pervasive gameplay: communication access, event notifications, asynchronous gameplay, synchronous player-to-player interaction, passive participation, and parallel reality.
• Findings come from six focus groups held in February and March 2005 with 20 players aged 17 to 40 (roughly 13 percent female), plus two developers who contributed by e-mail, and the authors frame the work as qualitative research for game design rather than marketing research.
• Players and developers reacted most favorably to optional, controllable, and peripheral features such as access to in-game chat and mobile auction or trading systems.