Your mobile phone is no longer just a mobile phone. As well as sending and receiving text messages and hooking up to the internet, it is now a powerful pocket games console that can connect to thousands of fellow users at any time.
So claim the various games companies vying for a slice of a market they call "pervasive" gaming. According to their makers, pervasive games are a new form of online entertainment that use a variety of different media to "invade" your life and "summon" you to play even when you are offline.
Last week EA.com, the online entertainment arm of US games giant Electronic Arts, unleashed Majestic, its first pervasive game and the first EA game to make use of the mobile phone.
Described by EA as "a powerful suspense thriller where the lines of reality are quickly blurred", Majestic uses a combination of email, text messaging, voicemail and fax to place players at the centre of a "sinister conspiracy theory involving covert government agencies and menacing fugitives". And, unlike most games, Majestic keeps playing even after you have shut down the computer. Its advance publicity boasts that Majestic might actually call you in the dead of night and regularly interrupt your working day.
Majestic is driven by a $10m database that tracks every piece of information it has sent to you and by what media. EA charges $9.95 for each of the eight episodes. Content providers such as EA are usually paid by the network operators to produce games for their mobile phone portals.
Another game, Botfighters, launched in Sweden this month, makes use of the device in mobile phones that alerts network operators to the geographical location of its users. Usually, this technology is used to inform users where their nearest curry house is, but the Swedish designers behind Botfighters have deployed the technology to build a kind of "virtual paintball", where users track each other down and virtually assassinate one another in very real urban environments.
A statement on their website reads: "With the phone as an umbilical cord, you're always connected to the game, and it's not always easy to tell reality from fiction." Scary stuff.
UK subscribers can expect Botfighters later this year, while EA Europe says it has yet to confirm a European release for Majestic. But cruder forms of pervasive game are already available in the UK. Games such as Star Trek: First Duty and Steve Jackson's Sorcery behave like role-playing games, updating their users with real time news of their simulated realities via the mobile phone.
And if you think these games sound a bit nerdy, consider the mass market potential of CMA Football Manager when it is released later this summer. If it is as successful as the fantasy football, cricket and motor racing games out there, we could be talking big money. In Japan, meanwhile, millions of commuters play a humble fishing game on their way to work using their i-mode phones. Their working day is then pervaded with news of virtual catches.
Majestic and Botfighters follow on from Nokia Game, which last year attracted half a million registered users across 18 European countries, the difference being that Nokia Game charged no subscription.
The appeal of pervasive games is not just that they offer an escape from reality, but that they offer an escape that can be made in secret. They are, perhaps, the ultimate time-waster. Indeed, the publicity for Majestic and Botfighters makes much of the fact that their games play you - not the other way round.
Links: www.majestic.ea.com
