Mark Ollila, director of technology and strategy at Nokia Games Publishing, is responsible for setting the development of gaming on Nokia’s mobile phones. His position is a powerful one: Nokia is still the world’s leading producer of mobile phones, its products comprising 38.1 per cent sold in the first quarter of 2009. With access to such an enormous market, Nokia has the potential to define mobile gaming – and that’s just what he hopes to do. Though iPhone gets all the headlines, with Nokia’s new Ovi Store, a single marketplace for apps and games launched last month, the N-Gage gaming platform, which was launched in April last year, and access to a host of services, from music to maps, at his disposal, Nokia is a sleeping giant in the world of mobile gaming.

Ollila’s current focus is on location-based gaming: games that use the player’s position in the world to produce their gaming experience. We talked with him about his ideas for this form of gaming, how to sell new game types to Nokia's casual audience and what he feels Nokia can bring to mobile gaming in general.

What’s the value of location-based gaming to the bulk of Nokia’s market?
Often people consider location-based games to be running around the streets and doing crazy physical activity, things like that, and sometimes, let’s say, the effort required to be involved in that is not particularly mainstream. What we’re looking into is ‘casual location’ and asking what a casual location game actually means. One of the things that comes into mind is maps, and we have a maps service on our handsets with our acquisition of Navteq [a large electronic map maker in October 2007]. So when it comes to location what we’re looking at what we can do with a map. If I’m in Finland at the moment and others are in London and my handset knows where we are, can I actually play with the map?

We’re looking at how we can create these casual location, games which don’t mean that you necessarily have to be running around doing physical activity, but allow a game experience which is based upon your location. We’ve been doing several pre-productions at the moment this idea, and one I’ve been showing to people is about taking the location you’re at and creating a racetrack around it, so you can race around the location using the satellite imagery of it.

So you’d have little 3D cars running on an image of the map of where you are?
You can actually do map editing, too, adjusting the corners and the location if you want. Here at Nokia in Finland we’ve created a track around the headquarters, and people are racing around to see who can get the best time. You can imagine playing the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or Piccadilly in London, and people wondering what it would be like to race around those places. This is a simple idea that doesn’t involve physical exertion, and fundamentally it’s capitalising on the information that we’ve already got available - the data and satellite imagery.

So that’s one example. Another is how can you do things that can take into account what people are interested in. We’ve got one particular forthcoming game called Yamake, which is about user-generated content. People can create their own quizzes and card games and share them with each other. One variation which we have not implemented but us something that could be easily done, is taking into account location-based quizzes, so when you enter a certain location there’d be quizzes that you can share, whether by friends or just anyone. So there are many different things that you could do with location to make interesting gameplay.


_{^{One, Nokia's 2008 fighting game in which players are grouped by where they're playing, with the object of becoming the best fighter in their local area}}

Do you think that location games are inherently multiplayer?
Well, this is interesting, because I think they can be both. They can be singleplayer - for instance, maybe you’re in New York, and New York is famous for all its skyscrapers so maybe there’s some sort of puzzle game that takes into account that fact that you’re in New York, does something with the geography in order to give you a puzzle to solve. Then there’s the multiplayer experience which can be competitive like the racing game I mentioned. There was also a European Union project which the Nokia Research Centre was involved in called Mythical: The Mobile Awakening, which was a sort of RPG in which spells needed artefacts to cast. One of the interesting things they played around with was that sometimes you needed a combination of things between your members – for one you needed daylight in Europe and moonlight in the USA. So in that way also it was a co-operative effort that used location.