Abstract
The Retro Mobile Gaming Database (RBMG) is a searchable database devoted to preserving the history of mobile gaming in the period between 1975 and 2008. The RBMG was created by the North Carolina State University, USA, Networked Mobilities Laboratory, and it is a useful resource for mobile communication studies (MCS) scholars and an important tool for exploring the history of a core period of mobile media and communication.
Mobile gaming has long been an important subset of research within the field of MCS. Beginning in the mid-2000s, MCS researchers began exploring how mobile phones could be used for gaming and how the combination of mobility and gaming could impact how people experienced physical spaces. Much of this research focused on somewhat niche location-based mobile games such as BotFighters and Mogi (de Souza e Silva, 2006; Licoppe & Inada, 2006), and by 2009, it was already possible for de Souza e Silva and Hjorth (2009) to publish an article on historical approaches to mobile games. This emerging body of MCS research then informed later work on locative media and gaming (e.g., Foursquare) that grew rapidly with the emergence of smartphones and app stores (Frith, 2013). Mobile games played through smartphones are now ubiquitous and a major way that people use their mobile phones. And following the 2017 release of the mobile Nintendo Switch—one of the best-selling gaming consoles of all time—mobile gaming has never been more popular than it is now.
The history of mobile games, whether we are talking about games accessed through mobile phones or mobile gaming consoles, is an important part of the history of MCS more broadly. However, that history is at risk of disappearing. Older cartridges for popular mobile consoles such as the Nintendo Gameboy or the Sega Game Gear often will not work without the hardware, and the hardware is difficult to track down. Early mobile phone games commonly are no longer accessible because the platforms have shut down. Often the only way to find records of these earlier games is through descriptions of them in academic articles or archived web pages. Much of the foundational history of mobile gaming is now dispersed across hard-to-find silos, and the RBMG platform's goal is to create a centralized source to preserve the important history of pre-smartphone mobile gaming.
The RBMG site is a searchable database that enables people to choose from different parameters to search for retro mobile gaming entries. The wide range of search parameters is a standout feature of the site because they allow people to easily organize results by interest. For example, searches can be sorted by parameters such as hardware, game genre, connectivity type, geographic location, and developer. Each one of those parameters features a drop-down menu that can be used to further refine search terms. In the “hardware” dropdown, for example, people can limit results to anything from “game consoles” to “mobile phones” to “GPS [Global Positioning System] devices.” The granularity of RBMG's search design makes the interface usable and functional, and the database is filled with interesting, and mostly forgotten, relics from the history of mobile gaming. For example, a search constrained to the period between 1975 and 1980 returns a wide range of handheld devices that I had never heard of but should be part of the story we tell of mobile media history.
The RMBG is administered by two mobile communication scholars—Adriana de Souza e Silva and Ragan Glover-Rijske—and relies upon a larger team to further develop the resource base. At this point, the RMBG is still in its relatively early stages, and the collection is far from comprehensive. However, the RBMG is using a crowd-sourced approach to building resources, and anyone can create an account and suggest an entry to be reviewed by moderators and added to the database. Helpfully, the RBMG features a clear style guide that people can follow for suggesting entries, and the crowd-sourced nature of RBMG's design provides excellent growth opportunities, especially if mobile communication scholars (and other mobile game fans) use the easy-to-find resources to help the project team to increase the already impressive number of entries.
In conclusion, the RBMG is a useful, important resource for the MCS community. The history of mobile media is often ephemeral, filled with hardware that is now almost impossible to find, platforms that no longer run, and websites that have not been operational for years. For our community to preserve the history of our field, we need platforms such as the RBMG that are consciously devoted to documenting our past before it disappears forever. I highly suggest that people visit the RBMG and help them add to their growing number of resources. Even if someone is not a mobile gaming scholar, it would still be worth it for the nostalgia rush when a search returns a device or game someone played with as a child and had not thought about in decades. The RBMG is an excellent resource for researchers and enthusiasts, and I hope we as a community can contribute to making its already expansive library even stronger.
Footnotes
Author biography
Jordan Frith is the Pearce Professor of Professional Communication at Clemson University. His primary research focuses on mobile media and infrastructure. He is the author of 3 books and more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles that focus on various types of mobile communication. For example, his second book was published as part of Polity's Digital Media and Society series and examined smartphones as locative media. His third book - A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification – was published by MIT Press in Spring 2019 and shifted to analysis of mobile infrastructures. He has also published widely in competitive journals, including New Media and Society, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Mobile Media and Communication.