Abstract

As an interface encompassing various converging platforms and contexts, mobile media devices such as the iPad, iPhone, PlayStation Portable (PSP), Nintendo DS and 3DS, Android phones, and increasing array of tablets are clearly becoming important spaces for gaming and playful social activities more broadly. With the increasing ubiquity of Web-capable smartphones and tablets, app-based ecologies and trends towards gamification—that is, the use of games and playful apps to boost consumption of products and services—mobile games are now an intrinsic part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Seventy-five percent of all mobile phone downloads are games, and the mobile gaming industry is now valued at US$50 billion, ¹ with some predicting that the mobile device will become the “primary screen” for games by 2016. ²