Chapter 7: Application Outlook 315 It’s then ever more frustrating when the game fails on him. If he decides to get friendly with a piece of code, it better be trustworthy. Not like Surreal Shards, that crap de la crap. He had invested two weeks in decoding the access to the time portal, spent countless hours talking to other people in that MMORPG, fi nding his way through the needlessly complicated social order of the game, and even invested some real money (borrowed from his sister) to rent the EPS powers. All of this, in vain. Last night, when he logged onto Shard’s site again, he was greeted with an error message boasting “You don’t exist. Go away.” After some trying and cursing and more trying, he then gathered from the site’s chat forum that this did indeed happen every now and then, and the only way to get over it was to start from scratch. Eddie could not believe it. How is it possible that an online game could lose a gamer’s profi le, so that all that work invested in the game would be lost? How on Virtual Earth could anyone in their sane minds allow this? Who could he sue? After a few days of useless complaints on the server’s customer service, Eddie calls it quits. They don’t want his business, he’s out. No more Shards for him. Another case of Never Trust a Piece of Code. Especially, emm, this pirated game that he copied from a friend. In addition to the content types discussed above, mobile games bring some new elements to the game. As discussed in section 7.2., location is an inherent feature of mobility. Not surprisingly then, mobile games location is, or will be, a key element both in game design and in game- related content. Customizations based on location, built on top of the generic game data, will play an important role. Games that systemati- cally blur and break the boundaries of the game in spatial, temporal, and social dimensions, are referred to as pervasive games (Montola 2005). For location-based customization, there are two approaches. Either the players make the customization – and the required tools – themselves, or there will be service providers that deliver either the customization or the tool, or both. The role of the tools should not be underestimated, as is the case in mods today, where the game devel- opers provide modding tools themselves and support modding explic- itly, the customization tools needed for location-aware games are becoming increasingly important. What is interesting in the relationship between games and personal content is that in many cases the content is not an end in itself, but rather an indirect vehicle for experiencing the actual content – which is playing and enjoying the game, and participating in the community. In other words, even though game-related content plays an important role, it still has a secondary role compared to many other application areas that explicitly deal with content.