Next Steps for Mobile Entertainment Portals

M obile communications and integrated data and voice services are ushering in a new era of personal, portable, and pervasive computing, in which entertainment services will figure prominently. A September 2000 Datamonitor study predicted that the mobile entertainment industry revenue will increase to $6 billion by 2005. Broadband wireless technologies are already enabling the development of intricate, multimediaenabled gaming content. Several wireless entertainment companies—Codeonline, nGame, and Indiqu—offer mobile games that adopt simple textand turn-based board strategies, such as those in Trivial Pursuit and tic-tac-toe. Role-playing online games like EverQuest (http://everquest.station. sony.com), as well as MUDs (multiuser dungeons) and MUSEs (multiuser simulated environments), have become extremely popular. These games allow both one-to-one and one-to-many interactions, which often fosters community building that in turn helps portals retain players for a longer term. Although mobile entertainment offers unprecedented flexibility, it also poses formidable challenges. Wireless games are constrained by the unpredictability and length of player interactions, traffic volume, uptime, and computational bottlenecks. As with other e-commerce applications, wireless games must be reliable, scalable, and secure. Guaranteeing correct processing under all anticipated and unexpected scenarios is a particularly thorny problem. Perhaps the greatest challenge is how to provide services and content rapidly while also satisfying continually changing customer requirements. Given the community orientation in entertainment portals, it is also natural to expect conflicts among players, designers, and game administrators. To meet these challenges, designers must have tools for analyzing game design and verifying design objectives. Just as software engineering tools revolutionized information systems design, tools that aid design analysis and verification are likely to transform wireless entertainment portals.