MOBISYS

Great is our pleasure to welcome you to the first ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Mobile Gaming -- MobiGames'12. 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 adapt to the highly dynamic mobile computing environment. There are many research challenges here 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.

At this first Mobile Gaming workshop, we are bringing together researchers as well as practitioners to discuss the latest developments in this growing field. We have 5 technical papers being presented on a diverse set of topics, including infrastructure for local wireless peer-to-peer games, research findings from deploying games, display power management, and using sensors in pervasive gaming. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Antti Aaltonen, who is the Director of User Experience at Rovio Entertainment Ltd, the creators of Angry Birds. Our keystone speaker is Dr. Victor Bahl, who is the Director and Research Manager of the Mobile Computing Research Center at Microsoft Research. Our workshop schedule includes discussions with several panelists, including Christoph Thur (CEO of Ovelin, which has a very unique approach to gamification of music learning), Markus Pasula (CEO of Grand Cru, which makes social MMO games), Sonja Kangas (Director of IGDA Finland which is one of the most active International Game Developers Association chapters in the world), Professor Fabian Bustamante from Northwestern University, Professor Frans Mayra who leads the University of Tampere Game Research Lab, and Professor Suman Banerjee from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.