History of Mobile Gaming, or "Snakes on a Train!"

I've just read an interesting article called "Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement". In it the authors trace a genealogy of mobiles games (such as playing 'snake' on your phone) back into the 19th Century, through developments in transport and entertainment.

Here are a few quotations to give you a flavour of the piece:


"The printed book, arguably the first mass-produced object (the first type of object that required and benefited from large-scale investment) was a successful medium of mobile entertainment almost from the start, when the octavo and duodecimo ‘pocketbook' formats of the sixteenth century started to appear. Printing and mass production also made possible a mass culture of portable entertainment, focused on all sorts of games - board games, dice games, card games etc."

"Lighter (both in content and as artifacts) newspapers were more suitable for mobile reading situations (Schivelbusch, 1977, p.62-66). Newspapers and similar media objects designed to be used in trains represent the first stages of mobile entertainment."

"One of the most basic uses for mobile media technology has been fulfilling the uncomfortable or dull moments for individuals using public transportation. The context of use causes certain requirements of size, weight, durability as well as user interface of mobile media of today."

"Card games have obviously been popular, but chess also spread in the early nineteenth century to industrial towns in Great Britain for example (Eales, 1985). Chessboards, dominoes, board games and other entertainment products spread throughout Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, both as home entertainment and as amusement used while travelling for example on steam boats."

"The logic that supported the Kinetoscope and the phonograph - that is, the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject - is replayed today in the increasing centrality of the computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption of electronic entertainment commodities"

"The stereoscope functioned as the equivalent of the modern mobile entertainment device in its ability to capture the user and transport him or her to another universe: "The immersiveness of the experience was always one of the evocative aspects of stereography. In its basic construction the stereoscope continued the tradition of all kinds of ‘peep-show' devices, which were popular entertainment in the nineteenth century at country fairs and even in children's rooms. The person who ‘immersed' his/her eyes into the ‘hood' of the stereoscope was in a sense alone with the scene s/he was observing. The situation resembles the experience of wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display, as had been pointed out" (Huhtamo, 1995) Huhtamo refers to virtual reality devices, but equally as justified as an example would be the mobile device with a screen that is basically meant to be a personal hole for "peeping into.""