Nokia Game

The Nokia Game

For two weeks every November thousands of UK gamers, and a million gamers world wide, have had their sleep patterns disrupted and their social lives wrecked by a unique gaming experience - the NokiaGame. Launched in 1999, Nokia Game is at its core a web based game where players compete to win the latest Nokia phone. It has though become something far more than that. In fact the most interesting parts of the game now happen well away from the NokiaGame site, and are a classic example of the power of the web community.

The 1999 game was set around Schiphol Airport, and in 2000 the action moved to Prague. However it was with the 2001 game that NokiaGame really started to become a world-wide event. The game revolved around a girl called Alpha escaping from the evil Tragamin (“Traditional Gaming”) company in order to protect and release the “tone

Players had to complete a series of games and challenges in order to guide Alpha to her destination. Clues came to players by text message, phone call, email, TV and radio ads, and even the Sun. The games ranged from strategy games to having to learn Morse code in 48 hours. The grand finale involved trying to navigate a boat against the clock, but proved too complex for Nokia’s servers to handle and the whole game crashed around the globe. Nokiagame players get used to bugs.

In 2002 we were all trying to run mobile entertainment empires. Nokia set up a fantasy stock market and players were buying and selling shares in technology and media companies. They also got to compose music tracks and design posters to upload into the 3D virtual worlds that Nokia had designed.

And this year they’ve been following Flo, a young reporter, around the world as she searches first for her stolen mobile phone, and then for the mysterious AnyOne. The games came thick and fast, with 4 snowboarding games and 5 puzzle games - all designed in the style of N-Gage games. The big innovation this year was that it was true player versus player gaming. No more trying to beat the computer, or find the ultimate cheat. Instead players signed in, waited for an opponent (usually only a few seconds) and were off.

These games though aren’t really what NokiaGame is all about - in truth it’s all about the player community. As Phil Thain who runs NG Forum, one of the leading NokiaGame fan-sites, says, “This is definitely what makes Nokia Game fun for me as a player. I find the Nokia Game electronic community inspiring. It is amazing how diverse the tips and tricks are”.

Take the 2001 game. At the start contestant were presented with a 3D view of an intersection with 3 tunnels leading off it. All they knew was the name of the intersection at the end of each tunnel, and how long it would take them - in real time - to travel down the tunnel. Players got points for every minute spent travelling, and some intersections were worth more points than others. Within hours the fan community had swung into action. Web sites were being set up to exchange information on what tunnels were available from which intersection. People started building and publishing tunnel maps. Before long most of the tunnel system had been mapped out. To maximize their scores players had to plan their travel so that they were by a PC each time their character emerged from a tunnel, so they could push them straight into another one. This meant late nights, early mornings, desperate hunts for cyber-cafes or BT web kiosks. Nokia even set up a voice capability so orders could be sent by phone.

With a highly active fan community it’s not surprising that Nokia can sometimes be completely outwitted. When faced with the task of learning Morse code in the same year again it didn’t take long for some bright spark to discover that if you loaded a piece of amateur radio Morse code software onto your PC then you could decode the Morse without any effort at all. The solution was flashed around the fan sites in minutes.

With the stock trading game in 2002 you would have thought that there’d be less scope for cheating, but hey, markets get fixed in real life, why not in Nokia Game. The fan community soon created real time stock graphs and stock tickers to help their trades. Then late one night a player realized that because prices always went up when demand for a stock was high, then if a lot of players could be convinced to buy at once, and then sell at the same time, then everybody could make more money. The idea was discussed on the main forum sites, and about 1am the first mass trade was made. All eyes were on the real-time stock ticker, and yes there was the blip, the trade had work and everybody had made money. Every hour through the night the trade was repeated, although with less and less people as even hardened gamers turned to sleep. By the morning the principle was established but the implementation had become fragmented. Which stock should it be on? Should it be an hourly or quarter hourly trade? Which player should be calling the trade? The cohesion of the community was lost.

By this year Nokia had begun to regain the upper hand on the fans, and started to have fun with them.

The pre-game teaser started a couple of weeks before the main game, with players being e-mailed a supposed MMS picture and short message from Flo as she journeyed from the Artic Circle, through Europe, the Far East and the USA. Players examined every detail of the obscure images they were sent, and traded ideas on the forums. For anybody who’s read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition this was the Footage Fetish Forum made real. Contestant soon found the letters buried inside each image. The most incredible find though was that someone managed to track down on the web the original of the photo used by Nokia for the first MMS - it was somebody’s holiday snap, and apparently used by Nokia without permission. There was a furore amongst the fans, and within days Nokia had changed the image. And the message encoded by the messages was in the end of now real use at all - Nokia was playing with the fans.

The second MMS was another rich source of clues. Scrawled on the wall of a phone booth was a web address (abcsd.com). The web site was soon tracked down, as was the fact that it was owned by the design company that built the NokiaGame. But the home page was showing a standard Page Not Found error. But was it? A quick check of the source HTML showed a message hidden there from the designers telling players not to expect any messages to be hidden there! During the course of the game abcsd.com changed several times with “clues” suitably hidden in it - but none ever had any impact on the game.

Nokia also created a phantom player - Zwarte Bea, who was mentioned in a hidden message on abcsd.com, but was also registered as a real user on the main fan sites. Some people even claim to have spoken to him in the forums.

But having players chase all these red herrings didn’t go down too well. Phil Thain again, “The thing is the story and the games weren't really interconnected - think tunnels, think the bus. We had a secret message in the MMSs, - yeah
right, like that would have helped in the final - I don't think so. No, although the story was quite well put together it was just padding”.

With the game now over the fan sites are becoming dormant, the players are getting a good night’s sleep again and the webmasters are getting back to their day jobs. NokiaGame is over for another year, and everybody is looking forward to getting back together again next November.

And that’s what makes this game so unique. Thousands of players putting in energy and creativity for an intense two week period. Not so much to pit their wits against each other, but more to team up and try and beat the best that Nokia can throw at them. Forget flash-mobs and flash-blogging. NokiaGame is flash-gaming.