Mobile media's an interesting topic. Different facets of the media space appear to be eyeing the mobile platform hesitantly, certain that they want to do something, but not quite sure what. Id Software just formed its own mobile gaming group with Fountainhead Entertainment, just on the heels of my conversation with Fountainhead's Katherine Anna Kang -- during which she pointed out that they'd found the quality of most mobile games was not what they believed it could be. A recent editorial at Games On Deck, our sister site devoted to mobile gaming, also presents the argument that, due to carrier conflicts, the mobile space has not yet reached a thriving point.

There is a lot of discussion at present about how mobile access might expand the worlds of MMOs and virtual worlds, allowing different points of access to a media experience. Worlds in Motion spoke with Empire of Sports' Christian Müller, who wants players of his sports-themed online world to be able to do exactly that with a cell phone.

Raph Koster is at MIT's Futures of Entertainment 2, not liveblogging per se (the MIT Cultural Convergence Consortium is already doing so), but he offers some thoughts on the panels he's attending -- in this case, from a session on Mobile Media:

...As more things, like broadcast TV (currently getting stuffed into mobile phones in Japan, which actually have TV tuners in them now) are added to the device, it may be that mobile ends up being the catch-all, the generalist.

Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation.

There’s also the fact that the Net is shifting strongly away from pesudonymity and towards real identity. Mobile is strongly titled towards this side of the equation, in a way that the Internet isn’t. What does that means for virtual worlds, which so strongly reward identity exploration?

Though it remains to be seen what role, exactly, the mobile platform will play in virtual worlds, Raph's point that there are key reasons that show there's definitely a spot for it somewhere, somehow, is worth considering!