Genius and the secret of knowing what to leave out.

A few years ago the author Douglas Adams suggested that some of the most revolutionary ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than something new to put in. He suggested that the Sony Walkman - for example (the predecessor of the iPod) added nothing significantly new to music playing - it just left out the amplifier and speakers thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. He goes on to say that a Dry Martini works by the brilliant, life-enhancing principle of leaving out the martini - and I'd guess by the same token he might have said that iTunes leaves out the whole bulky expensive business of actually having CD, printed case inserts etc and just sells you the music.

Well here is are a few predictions for the next 12 months based on that wonderful and wise minimalist philosophy.

• Laser tag games like Laser tag games like Laser Quest, LaserTron and Quasar will loose their Lasers and Paintball its paint to a new generation of technology.
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft, Dofus and Runescape will lose their browsers and consoles and move into the real world
• Mobile games will loose their limits of being restricted just to a 4 inch screen.
• Wii type games will loose their consoles

. . . and all of the above will be combined to give the best of all of them. Of course to old technology will still be around - people still play text adventures and play banjos occasionally - but the mainstream will move on.

What's wrong with mobile games?

I guess that basically mobile games at present are mainly video game played on mobile phones, smartphones, tablets or portable media player. The precursors to these are games played on handheld video game systems such as Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable - but what they are in essence are games that could just as well be played on a static platform - but squeezed into a mobile. That makes them very much like a first generation mobile phone - which was just a landline type functionality squeezed into a portable box - but lacking the other possibilities of the new platform type. Even games like Angry Birds are basically extensions of the first game mobile game ever (Tetris on the Hagenuk MT-2000 in 1994 basically something that you prod the phone to inter act with sand peering into the display to see. With GPS location identification, acceleration, orientation and motion sensing and multiplayer ability die to client server and peer to peer interactions the challenge for gaming it to go beyond the prod-the-box scenario into something that can take on the Wii consoles, the MMPORPGs like World of Warcraft and the real world technology mediated experiences like Quasar and LaserQuest to create a next generation experience.