Local gaming with the iPhone – Scrabble Party Play

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/04/scrabble-for-the-ipad-stir-in-some-iphones-and-its-the-best-1/

Remember when the Zunes came out with the “Squirt” feature? You could share a song with somebody else with a Zune wirelessly. The big joke at the time is that there were so few Zunes that you could never find anybody to test the feature out with.

We actually love the smaller Zunes, use them every day, prefer them to iPods, especially when you add in the Zune subscription service, which is an amazing deal and somehow remains stealthed despite it’s overwhelming value.

But that’s not what this post is about. One of the cool differences between the iPhone/iPad/Touch franchise and the Zune franchise, is that iPhones etc. as hugely popular. No matter where you are there are at least a couple. This make scenarios like local gaming work really well.

We’ve tried several of the games that you can play over wifi with multiple players. They can be a lot of fun when they work well, but it’s a mixed bag. Uno is one I can think of that works really well.

But I’ve been looking forward to trying out the “Party Play” mode of Scrabble for awhile now. You install the “Tile Rack” app on up to 4 iPhones and Touches, and then they act as the Tile Rack, while your iPad acts as the board.

I tried this over Bluetooth awhile ago, and it didn’t work at all. But on a recent vacation I had enough iPhones, Touches, and people to run them to actually go through a whole game. This time, on a friend’s recommendation I tried wifi, even though most of the help you see recommends Bluetooth. It actually worked. We got all 4 devices signed into a game, with the iPad acting as the board. We played through and completed the game successfully. Despite that, the experience was less than fun, and I think there are some good lessons to be learned from why.

1. The iPad screen is not as big as the actual Scrabble board, so we couldn’t put it in the middle of the table so that everybody could look at it – it was just too hard to see. Instead we had to pass the iPad to each person when it was their turn. This meant that the other players could not work on their play, an important part of the game. Plus now each person is handling two devices, which seems to defeat the purpose of using the iPhones as Tile Racks.

2. The devices all have short screen blank-out times. When the device sleeps, wifi sleeps, which disconnects you from the game. There is some facility for reconnecting, and it worked reasonably well (witness the fact that we finished the game), however it was very painful having to interrupt the game every few minutes to get someone back in, plus everyone was too terrified of disconnecting to put their device down to get a drink or what have you, and kept touching the screen to keep it from sleeping, even though they couldn’t see the board to work on their play. I’ve heard this doesn’t happen on Bluetooth (thus the urging to use it instead), however I found it to be a huge hassle, and unsuccessful.

3. The actual act of flinging your tiles from the “Tile Rack” to the “Board” felt curiously like a novelty, a stunt, a gimmick. It worked ok, and somewhat represented the actual action you take with the physical tile rack and board, but when you fling them, they go to a holding area on the iPad board, and you have to then move the letter to where you want to play. So in some sense there was more pointless work using the tile rack than not, which becomes annoying in a repetitive game.

So what are the lessons to be learned for future games involving local play, especially ones that incorporate the iPad as a central display of some kind?

1. Make sure the game is absolutely easy to set up, and that the underlying platforms, such as networking, are stable and invisible.

2. Make sure the game is easy to play, works better than any physical analogs, and emphasizes the advantages of the platform and de-emphasizes the disadvantages.

3. Novelty wears off quickly. We actually bring a Scrabble game wherever we go, so if this had worked well, it could have replaced our physical game, as we also bring the iPad, iPhones and Touches. However everyone who played agreed we would never do it again, it was just not fun.