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Mobile games are having tremendous growth in the game market. Among its multiple possible forms, asynchronous games (Bogost, 2004; Saarenpää et al., 2009), evolve in a sequence of interactions similar to traditional board games (e.g., chess). Mobile technologies allow interactions to occur remotely, producing an invisible tie between the players (Bogost, 2004), that can “leave the game running in the background while doing something else” (Saarenpää et al., 2009). There are interesting examples in the social network market (Baabdullah, 2020; Shin & Shin, 2011) where asynchronous social games like Farmville allow personal entertainment. As we explore in this paper, there are other cases where interaction with other users is the main goal, raising new challenges to keep the players interested and willing to pay for the game experience.
The study of social interaction in mobile games is a growing area of research. For example, articles evaluating end-users awareness for “collaboration and understanding each other in order to avoid the risk of dissenting which is crucial in social games” (Baabdullah, 2020). Other authors found positive results in the learning outcomes of asynchronous games, exploring the continuous online and offline tasks (Fan et al., 2017), and exploring the emerging pervasiveness of this genre of mobile games (Valente et al., 2017). However, these essential studies address the runtime phases of adoption and use, lacking studies focusing on the design-time of social interaction in asynchronous mobile games.
Our work extends past contributions on guidelines for game design (e.g., for older adults as presented by Kawamoto, Martins and Da Silva (2014) or wireless application protocol games introduced by Shchiglik, Barnes, Scornavacca and Tate (2004)) focusing the aspects of commercial mobile games with an asynchronous mechanics. Intermittent idleness is another characteristic of asynchronous games that we address in this paper. Therefore, there are opportunities for more intelligent (Sun et al., 2020) and collective interaction during the game and also outside of the game, including the interface, reflection after a move, discussion before a move, or about the game and related topics (Stenros et al., 2009).
This research has started with a game producer introducing their second asynchronous mobile game in the market. The company planned to create a commercial game that explores telepathy as the central concept, where players must match their answer to a common question. Game producers make significant investments in mobile game development, but the return is uncertain, particularly when a social network is not the main target of the game. Playfulness, price, and user reward are essential to capture the interest of paying players (Hsiao & Chen, 2016), but what are the leading engineering principles that promote social interaction in asynchronous mobile games? This is the central question addressed in this work.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The following section presents background concepts about the mobile game market and the particularities of asynchronous mobile games. Next, the design science research approach is presented, aiming to propose engineering guidelines for commercial asynchronous mobile games. Afterwards, it is included a comparison of different asynchronous mobile games to extract their key features. Subsequently, the design and development are detailed in a tutorial style that includes the technical infrastructure and design rationale. The discussion follows, highlighting the key lessons learned and design principles. The paper closes by summarizing the conclusions, the study limitations, and the opportunities for future work.