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111 7 Unlimited Minutes Playing Games in the Palm ofYour Hand Sheila C. Murphy You Have One New Message First off, I have a disclaimer or two. Talking on the phone, whether to accomplish a task or to “keep in touch” with a remote friend or relative, is often an onerous chore. Some people love the phone—Andy Warhol spent much of his adult life on it. He even “wrote” his diary by placing a daily phone call to employee Pat Hackett, who transcribed Warhol’s daily activities and expenses into a log that was posthumously published as The Andy Warhol Diaries. With the rise of cellular or wireless phone services , people throughout the globe have fallen in love with their phones— buying custom ring tones, expensive phone accessories, or elegant and multifunctional phone devices. Yet, when the phone rings, some—myself included­ —are filled with a slight dread. Who is calling? Why? How does one cope with the constant interruption and embarrassing ring tones that inevitably play in inopportune times and places? Yet wireless phones are today used both in global capitalist zones, like the United States and Japan , and in developing countries, where mobile phone technologies are easier to disperse among the rural poor. This means that people the world over are walking, talking communications nodules—accessible nearly all the time and, perhaps more crucially for this discussion, rarely without a handheld mobile device. If E.T. were to phone home today, surely his family would have gotten the call more quickly—perhaps on a Bluetooth headset—and they could have text-messaged him to let him know where and when they would pick him up. In mid-2005, as I write this chapter, bands have released albums only as ring tones (in Germany), phones perform a multitude of tasks that go beyond voice transmission, and phone fashions—from pony-hide holsters to fun fur pouches—are ubiquitous if 112 Playing and the Past not tasteful. Wireless phones and other handheld technologies like digital music players and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are now fully incorporated into contemporary experience. Literally, phones have become part of our physical existence—a small but palpable presence we carry and wear. This essay explores how these devices function as gaming platforms when their primary functions are not in use, such as during the seemingly unlimited minutes one finds unexpectedly but routinely while waiting out traffic, for an appointment at the doctor’s office, or at the bus stop. How can we play our way through the banal and mundane aspects of daily experience? How and why would one play these graphically ­ simple, small-screen games? The very fact that mobile devices include video games as features speaks to how the telecommunications and computing industries see some continuity between mobile data devices like phones and PDAs and handheld gaming platforms like Nintendo’s Game Boy or Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP). The titles and types of games that are readily available and/or bundled in with phones and PDAs often summon up memories of popular or groundbreaking video games from various moments in the history of video games. Like free, web-based video games that evoke the basic structures of arcade hits (the numerous variations on Taito’s Space Invaders [1978] come to mind), phone and PDA-based mobile games are intended to reach a wide audience familiar with but not deeply invested in video games. Yet the very inclusion—however cursory—of video games into these non-gaming, handheld, small-screen new media devices indicates how video gaming has become a routine part of early twenty-firstcentury technologically-enabled living, there to help one occupy “down times” or tune out and mediate one’s surroundings, right in the palm of one’s hand. Frequently, the games bundled into palm devices like phones and digital assistants recall the early days of the gaming industry, when simple, iconic colors, shapes and sounds dominated game design. Whether as an explicit remake, like my LG 400’s Pac-Man port, or in original styles based on early styles, handheld games share the video game visuals and sound from an earlier era (the 1970s and early 1980s) when game aesthetics and interactivity were largely born out of technological necessity: games were efficient in their use of a machine’s limited resources. The resulting iconography—Pac-Man’s yellow circle with the missing triangle/slice, PONG’s acerbic “you lose” tone, Breakout’s boldly striped wall—shaped the industry...

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