Let the Games Begin

Wireless gaming is upon us. Hours of increased airtime. Addictive usage patterns resulting in higher monthly phone bills. Fresh, compelling reasons for new adopters and broader markets. The rewards will be great. The Pandora's box is unsealed, and the resulting consequences will be commensurately alarming. Prepare for a whole new world of customer crises.

Appropriately enough, wireless gaming is about to send carriers into the realm of umpiring. It's inevitable that any new application dependent on quality of transmission — troubled, trembling data transmission at that — is bound to confuse end-users baffled by the simple reality of who is making all of this happen. (The language of the consumer is littered with misunderstanding: “I just signed up for that new wireless gaming service!” “Who's the carrier?” “Motorola.” You get the picture.)

It'll start out innocently enough. A simple game of Snake — chasing a black dot on the screen of your digital device — will grow into more complicated pursuits. Tetris is coming. Can Tomb Raider be far behind? Game developers such as THQ, which exhibited at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles last month (www.thq.com), promise it's just a matter of time before co-workers in separate airport waiting areas — LAX and LGA, let's say — are firing shots back and forth … across that 2-by-2-inch screen … bouncing off of transmission towers … carried by the airwaves. Users can flip over to the Internet to download game upgrades, ideally to expand to multiplayer levels that then invite, say, players in ATL or BWI or LVA.

Oh, by the way, it's your network that's making all of this happen.

Game makers currently are driving public excitement around this new wireless promise. And, frankly, they're doing this industry a huge favor. In a year of economic correction, an audience of 600 million worldwide wireless users is a pretty deep well to ignore. What better way to trick them into digging deeper into their wallets than with fun stuff?

“Wireless entertainment offers an excellent opportunity for carriers to increase subscriber-usage levels, reduce churn and enhance the overall user experience for their extremely fickle subscriber base,” said Knox Bricken, an analyst at Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com), which recently released a report predicting that — surprise! — gaming will be a lucrative part of domestic carriers' futures.

(An aside that's not meant to be in any way dismissive of an industry that still struggles with voice transmission: At the same time that the Yankee Group was forecasting the next big thing, Cingular (www.cingular.com) was delaying the launch of some of its advanced services; it was supposed to happen this month, but rumored handset issues will keep subscribers waiting until at least late summer. Around the same time, Amazon.com put an end to its m-commerce deal with Sprint (www.sprint.com). And NTT DoCoMo's woes widened to include e-mail glitches in its recent 3G trials (www.nttdocomo.com). In light of all this, are we again creating appetites for glorious buffets before we've even figured out how to turn on the stove?)

Once wireless gaming becomes a reality, as it will, anticipate that the customers most aware of who is making this happen — (“I just signed up for that new wireless gaming service!” “Who's the carrier?” “Verizon.”) — will know just whom to call when gaming becomes a problem. Technical considerations, age-appropriateness issues and, yes, driver-distraction concerns. Those complaints about “your content” will fall to your call center. The content for which you are the conduit by default becomes your concern.

Speaking of the distracted-driver issue: The University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center (www.hsrc.unc.edu) — funded by the American Automobile Association (www.aaa.com) — has good news for wireless carriers. Information gathered from more than 32,000 vehicle crashes over a 5-year period reveals that there are a lot more distracting at-the-wheel activities than using a wireless phone: something going on outside the car; playing with the car stereo; talking to a passenger; adjusting climate controls; eating and drinking. In fact, only the act of smoking was less distracting. Who knew that one study could so resoundingly absolve both talkers and smokers? Let's see this again five years down the line when a diverting game of Ms. Pac-Man is figured into the statistics!

Comments? Write to dsextro@intertec.com.