Workshop on Mobile Gaming (MobiGames)
Monday, August 13, 2012
Helsinki, Finland
Rooms: #22-24
Technical Program
Introduction
Sharad Agarwal & Rajesh Balan
Keynote
Antti Aaltonen (Ph.D., Director, User Experience, Rovio)
Legends of Descent - Analytics of an Ad-supported Windows Phone Roleplaying Game
Ian Obermiller; Sam Bayless
The Anatomy of a Large Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Ashish Patro; Shravan Rayanchu; Michael Griepentrog; Yadi Ma; Suman Banerjee
Bridging the Gap Between Mobile Devices and MMOGs
Markus Pasula (CEO, Grand Cru), Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Frans Mäyrä (University of Tampere)
Bridging the Gap between Industry and Academia
Christoph Thür (CEO, Ovelin), Aki Järvinen (Ph.D., Creative Director, Digital Chocolate), Fabián Bustamante (Northwestern)
MicroPlay: A Networking Framework for Local Multiplayer Games
Anh Le; Lorenzo Keller; Christina Fragouli; Athina Markopoulou
Toward a Mobile Platform for Pervasive Games
Inseok Hwang; Youngki Lee; Taiwoo Park; Junehwa Song
Adaptive Display Power Management for OLED Displays
Tan Kiat Wee; Rajesh Krishna Balan
Keynote
Victor Bahl (Director, Microsoft Research)
Closing Remarks
Sharad Agarwal & Rajesh Balan
Bios
Antti Aaltonen, Ph.D., (Rovio)
Dr. Antti Aaltonen has been doing and leading user experience design over 15 years for different domains and platforms. Being enthusiastic gamer since Commodore VIC-20 days, in his current role as Director of User experience in Rovio Entertainment Ltd. Antti is passionate about creating polished and rewarding gaming experiences. Before joining Rovio he worked in various user experience related positions in Nokia. Antti has written a book about personal content experiencing and over ten publications.
Paramvir Bahl, Ph.D., (Microsoft Research)
Victor Bahl is the Director of the Mobile Computing Research Center (MCRC) in Microsoft Research. Prior to MCRC, Victor founded the Networking Research Group and served as its manager for 8 years. He continues to help shape Microsoft’s long-term vision related to networking technologies through research and associated policy engagement with governments and institutions around the world. His personal research interests span a variety of topics in mobile computing, wireless systems, cloud computing and datacenter / enterprise networking & management. He has built and deployed several seminal and highly cited systems many of which have been broadly adopted by the computing industry and shipped in Microsoft products. He has authored over 115 peer-reviewed papers and 86 patents. He has received several notable accolades including Microsoft’s Individual Performance Award (three times), SIGMOBILE’s Distinguished Service Award, IEEE’s Northwest Region 6 Outstanding Engineer Award, UMASS Amherst’s Distinguished Alumni Award, SIGCOMM’s and CoNext’s Best Paper Award, FCC’s Open Internet App. Award and FCC’s People’s Choice App Award. Dr. Bahl is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.
Markus Pasula (Grand Cru)
Markus Pasula (Helsinki, Finland) is a technology and games guru with background in mobile game industry and real-time graphics development. In 2011, Markus embarked with five Finnish game industry veterans to found Grand Cru. Grand Cru’s mission is to revolutionize the mobile and social gaming. As the CEO of the company, he keeps the things rolling from planning and hands-on operations to leading the team of game creators. Prior to Grand Cru, Markus worked at Mr.Goodliving/RealNetworks in various roles, including Head of Studio, Head of Technology and Head of Customer Operations EMEA. Back in the 1990’s Markus was one of the pioneers in the Finnish Demoscene winning international demo competitions.
Suman Banerjee (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Suman Banerjee is an Associate Professor in Computer Sciences at UW-Madison. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Maryland. He is a recipient of the NSF Career Award. He is the founding director of the WiNGS laboratory at UW-Madison. His research interest is broadly in networking and distributed systems, and his focus in recent years have been in different aspects of mobile and wireless systems.
Frans Mäyrä (University of Tampere)
Frans Mäyrä is the Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, with specialization in digital culture and game studies in the University of Tampere, Finland. He is the head of University of Tampere Game Research Lab, and has taught and studied digital culture and games from the early 1990s. His research interests include game cultures, meaning making through playful interaction, online social play, borderlines, identity, as well as transmedial fantasy and science fiction.
Christoph Thür (Ovelin)
Chris is co-founder and CEO of Ovelin, a Finnish company that is taking an exciting approach to gamification of music instrument learning. Ovelin’s first title WildChords is an iPad game that makes learning to play the guitar fun, addictive and motivating. It is played with a real guitar, and requires no additional equipment (sound picked up through the iPad microphone). Prior to Ovelin, Chris was a Laser Scientist and guitar drop-out. Originally from Switzerland, Chris now lives in Finland where he co-founded Ovelin, and enjoys swimming in the Avanto (hole in the ice).
Aki Järvinen, Ph.D., (Creative Director, Digital Chocolate)
Aki Järvinen works as the Creative Director at Digital Chocolate’s Helsinki studio in Finland. He has more than a decade of experience from designing and producing mobile games, online gambling, and browser-based games. Aki has also written a Ph.D. on academic methods of analyzing games from the perspectives of design and psychology. He has been involved in multiple game related research projects, and given numerous talks in both academic and industry conferences. Currently he is leading a team developing a next generation social game. You can follow his blog at: http://games4networks.posterous.com
Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)
Fabián E. Bustamante is an associate professor of computer science in the EECS Department at Northwestern University. He joined Northwestern in 2002, after receiving his M.S. and Ph.D. from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He leads the AquaLab group investigating networking and systems issues with Internet-scale distributed computing. Fabián is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation CAREER award and the E.T.S. Watson Fellowship Award from the Science Foundation of Ireland, and a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE.
Introduction
While they are a relatively new phenomenon, games on smartphones have become wildly popular with users. Games consistently dominate the top purchases on mobile app marketplaces. With the intense competition that has ensued in this industry, games are now rapidly incorporating sophisticated technologies that have been adapted to the mobile computing environment, many of which are of growing importance to researchers. There are many research challenges across graphics, energy consumption, network latency, HCI, security, and sensor networking. While this field is interdisciplinary by nature, many proposed ideas have direct impact on how networking protocols and infrastructures are designed and managed.
In this first Mobile Gaming workshop at SIGCOMM, we will bring together practitioners as well as interested researchers to discuss the latest developments in this growing field. We will identify what we have already achieved, the challenges that lie ahead, and promising avenues forward.
PDF versionText versionTopics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- cheating in networked mobile games
- reducing the energy consumption of mobile games
- increasing the quality of graphics on phones
- tolerating limited bandwidth and high latency on wireless links in games
- impact of device limitations on mobile game players
- mobile games that interact with other devices in the vicinity such as TVs, sensors, and other phones
- protocols and architectural designs or concerns for next generation mobile games
- optimizing game servers and transport for mobile users
- cross-device gaming (e.g. phones, slates, PCs, consoles)
- novel game types and/or interaction modalities
- matchmaking for mobile multiplayer games
- detailed traffic measurements or usability studies of mobile games
- massively multiplayer mobile gaming
Submission Instructions
All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. The workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work-in-progress, so long as the promise of the approach is demonstrated. Radical ideas or position papers, potentially of a controversial nature, are strongly encouraged. Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages in length and author names and affiliations should be included in the submission. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines at http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/. Submit your work at https://apollo.smu.edu.sg/mobigames12/.
Email the OrganizersImportant Dates
Submissions Due
March 22, 2012
Notification of Acceptance
May 15, 2012
Camera Ready
June 1, 2012
Workshop Date
August 13, 2012
Committees
- Program Committee Co-Chairs
Sharad Agarwal
Microsoft Research
Rajesh Krishna Balan
Singapore Management University
- Program Committee Members
Sharad Agarwal
Microsoft Research
Aditya Akella
U. Wisconsin-Madison
Rajesh Balan
Singapore Management University
Suman Banerjee
U. Wisconsin-Madison
David Chu
Microsoft Research
Janne Lindqvist
Rutgers University
April Slayden Mitchell
Hewlett-Packard Labs
Jeffrey Pang
AT&T Labs
Junehwa Song
KAIST
Lin Zhong
Rice University