Context and situation as enablers for multi-modal interaction in mobile games

Location-based mobile multiplayer games can offer a unique and intensive game experience. Three spheres of experience merge: social interaction, virtual game world, and the real location. While the potential is huge the main obstacle to a seamless and enjoyable experience is the user interaction with the mobile system. The problem is not the sheer lack of interaction techniques, but the assignment of appropri-ate modality in different game situations. The main state-ment of this paper is: multimodality alone is not enough to cope with mobile gaming. Context-awareness that lead to situation-specific interaction modes may come to the rescue. This paper discusses the requirements of modality selection against the background of location-based multiplayer games and illustrates the correlation to context-awareness and sit-uation detection. 1. MARKET In the last years, mobile phones moved from simple voice-and text-handsets to small computing platforms. With this, the possibilities for enhanced entertainment options have in-creased: photos, video, music – everything on the go. Since the advent of the Java-based phones a vivid and growing mobile games market has evolved. A recent study by Ju-niper research1 expects the mobile games market to reach 10 billion US- $ by 2009 and more than 460 million mobile users are expected to download games for their devices in that year. When the iPhone AppStore launched on July 10, 2008, more than 160 out of 500 applications provided gaming experiences. Currently most of the discussed mobile games focus on a casual single player play mode, but powerful location-aware mobile devices enable more games that exploit location an