Interviews

Talking about the future for N-Gage with Nokia's Dr Mark Ollila

What role will GPS, cameras and cross-platform gaming have?

Talking about the future for N-Gage with Nokia's Dr Mark Ollila
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As the launch of Nokia's new N-Gage platform edges ever closer, anticipation is building about Nokia's plans for the new platform. And for the bigger picture, Dr Mark Ollila is the man to ask.

Ollila actually has two roles within Nokia: he heads up the company's first-party publishing division, which is creating games for N-Gage, but he's also the director of technology & strategy, which involves more future gazing.

"It's about looking at mobile gaming with a strategic point of view looking three to five years ahead," he explains before we begin the interview. "Meanwhile, the first-party publishing side is about being a profitable publisher, but also driving the platform and taking risks which third-party publishers might not necessarily do."

With that distinction clear in our typically vacuous heads, we fired off the questions before we forgot them.

Pocket Gamer: How much does technology lead games, as opposed to the other way around?

Dr Mark Ollila: We're very interested in how we can utilise a range of new technologies, and it's one of our remits to drive the platform using these features. So if we have a feature on our SDK [software development kit] roadmap, we'll look at how we can drive a concept around that feature.

What's important, though, is we don't want to necessarily have the technology driving the actual gameplay. We're very focused on creating good games, so gameplay is very important, obviously. But what we're looking at is how technology can add to that gameplay, and give an experience that players will enjoy.

It's also very interesting for us to explore the idea that it's not just about winning games: they can also be about fundamentally just having fun, being rewarded, and sharing that experience with other people. So one focus is games and community experiences around rewarding and sharing.

It taps into what we're seeing on the internet with various social networking and Web 2.0 type behaviours. How can we capture that sort of phenomena in mobile?

Is this about finding ways to make games that could only be mobile, rather than copying technologies from the console world?

There's an understanding of the fact that people are using their mobile devices to access their lives in more forms than just a contact list, as they learn that the devices they carry are very powerful. So it's about communities you create, and have access to them on the move.

One of our favourite notions is location-based services or GPS-enabled services, which aren't particularly useful on your home PC! So mobiles inherently give game developers the opportunity to think about innovative concepts and game ideas, which don't need to be about winning and hardcore gameplay.

Nokia is obviously getting into GPS with phones like the N95, but how does gaming fit into that? Is it just 'first-person shooters in the real world'?

We're learning a lot about what types of people are using our mapping services, and from a gaming perspective there's a big interest in how people are using those services, and how we can tie gaming concepts into those that we can actually release.

It's going to be more than what's been traditionally thought of with location-based games, where we'll bring in how we can reward people and share the experience that they've had over a location.

It's one reason we sponsor the IMG Awards, as it's an opportunity for us to see ideas that are out there. If they're interesting, we'll look at taking something further.

How about phone features like the camera? Do they have a big role to play in N-Gage gaming going forward?

It's very interesting. We can do things like motion-tracking with a camera, and could add some simple things like face recognition or face finding.

The Nokia Research Centre had a project where you used your handset camera to create a racing track, by moving the camera, or using it to take a photo of a hand-drawn track, which was then used to generate the actual track for a game.

It's mechanisms like these that we can use to get people doing user-generated content, creating levels for a game, and then getting community interaction and participation.

Is this kind of stuff expensive for developers?

I can only talk about our first-party operations, really, but it's our financial risk, driving the platform forward. What I will say is that developers are coming to us with different ideas, and they're looking to be seen as first to come out with an innovative idea or feature that challenges the norms of mobile gameplay.

How important will cross-platform gameplay be for N-Gage? We've written about Project White Rock

Well, it's very important that games are made for mobile, but people live in a connected world. If there's an opportunity for us to build a community, I'd like them to be able to access that community from wherever they are, from the web or mobile devices.

We have two games that have the cross-platform element, being available on PC as well as mobile, with one of them having sharing features.

Traditional PC gamers versus mobile gamers in a first-person shooter wouldn't necessarily work, but look at the fast casual snack-type games which exist out there. You know your friends are online, but don't know where – but you could still play.

PC FPS versus mobile isn't necessarily the way anyone wants to go, but it's more about leveraging the social network side of the internet. But the emphasis is firmly on mobile, mobile, mobile for us, but we're allowing people to have a PC experience as well.

When we recently interviewed Nokia's Jaakko Kaidesoja, he talked about 3D hardware acceleration in N-Gage handsets. How much of a factor will this be?

As you know, the N-Gage platform runs across many different handsets. Some of them are hardware-accelerated, like the N95 and N93, and some are not, like the N73. What we're focusing on is titles that work across all those handsets.

Over time, as our hardware evolves, it [hardware acceleration] will become more and more important. How it fits into the actual gameplay and game development is yet to be decided. We want to ensure as many people can play N-Gage games which are still the best quality in terms of graphics and multimedia features.

Lastly, how about music? Nokia is big on music at the moment, with phones like the N81 and its upcoming Nokia Music Store. How much crossover is there with N-Gage gaming?

I can refer to the Nokia Research Centre again, which has had some projects looking at how music can be used in gaming. One thing that's clear is that we need to be able to allow people to access their music and tie it into their gaming experience.

How we do that, and how we allow the developer to do that, is something that will evolve as our SDK evolves, but it's absolutely something that we're aware of.

Our thanks to Dr Ollila for his time. N-Gage is due in November and we'll continue to cover any pre-launch developments relating to Nokia's promising new platform between now and then.
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)