Opinion: The future of connected gaming is local, not global

Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! By which I mean have a butchers at the global leaderboards for the Frozen Wasteland level of Space Impact on N-Gage (in Score Attack mode), and marvel at the way Stu77 is 19th in the world. 19th!

Of course, the problem is that only a few hundred people have actually posted a score for that level. And when the N-Gage application rolls out to handsets other than the N81, I'll be sinking down the rankings like a stone. A stone tied to an anvil, encased in concrete, with a Titanic-sized anchor attached.

Yes, the problem with global leaderboards is that pretty quickly, they get clogged up by lots of other people around the world who are better than you. Being 19th is something to boast about, but when you're down in the low 13,000s, the novelty wears off.

Global high-score tables suck royally, because unless you're a ninja gamer (by which I refer to students, the unemployed or androids), they're meaningless. Rising 78 places counts for very little when there are still tens of thousands of people ahead of you.

The same thing happened with Project Gotham Racing on mobile a while back. On Christmas Day 2006, I was sitting pretty in the top five of the global rankings (admittedly, this was when the game was only actually available to journalists reviewing it).

Come the New Year, and I was languishing in no man's land, and I quickly lost interest in posting any more scores. Global leaderboards are a short-term novelty, but a long-term bust for most of us.

That's why the future of connected mobile gaming is local.

It's local in two ways. First, there's regions. How do I compare to people playing in England? In Hertfordshire? In Bishop's Stortford? In my house? I might have a shot at top spot in that last one.

Segmenting high-score tables by locality makes them much more sticky.

But the second way is the most exciting: league tables consisting purely of your friends and family. If I could have set up a mini-league on Project Gotham Racing for my five closest friends, we'd still be playing it now.

Especially if it included messaging telling you when someone had overtaken your score.

The fantasy football industry learned this ages ago, and it's now common practice to allow people to set up these mates mini-leagues, to keep their interest going throughout the season, even if they're scrapping it out for hundred thousandth spot in the national table.

The problems with doing this kind of thing on mobile are in the main technical. It's bloody hard to do, especially when you're trying to run it across different operators and handsets. Doing a unified global leaderboard is difficult enough.

Yet it's something that will surely be sorted if the mobile games industry is serious about this connectivity lark. People will play, play and play again if they're going up against their friends.

There's another example of where this is happening right now: Facebook. If you haven't played Tower Bloxx or Who Has the Biggest Brain?, then as soon as you finish reading this article, click on their respective links and have a go.

Seeing your score eclipse your friends (in real-time on Tower Bloxx) is awesomely addictive. The fact that both those games were created by current or former mobile game developers shows that people in this industry understand the pulling power of mate-mashing (to coin a not particularly good phrase).

Operators, publishers, developers and handset makers, it's time to bang your heads together and figure out a way to make this as easy to do on mobile as it is on Facebook.

If nothing else, it'll save me from the shame of having to take bragging rights from games that the population at large haven't played yet.