Keitai

I’ll be the first to admit i’m probably not your typical consumer. I don’t own a home or car, have no kids, watch little mainstream TV, don’t eat fast food, live in a tiny flat with little interest in a larger one, don’t shop much for items to decorate my surroundings, don’t have a large network of friends or family and spend most of by disposable income on books and travel. I also have three nationalities and several adopted countries and cultures which sometimes leaves me with confusion as to where exactly I fit in.

So all this inevitably leads to doubt when designing products or concepts for clients. Do I really get it? Does research alone allow me to put myself in the shoes of consumers who are sometimes not-at-all like me—enough to create something they will enjoy or find useful? Is my cultural ‘confusion’ an advantage or a curse? I’ve had all these doubts when designing mobile products as well.

In a perfect world there’d be a cornucopia of mobile stuff out there for all age groups and interests—just like there is on the web. And I think this needs to happen simply because the mobile is the most ubiquitous device out there. It seems silly that 2.5 billion of us are right now carrying around something that—admittedly is already vital in the way we do business, communicate with friends and family, organize our lives—but so far somewhat lacking in providing us with useful, relevant and enriching knowledge or experiences delivered in the form of content (art, design, music, moving pictures, storytelling, etc.)

But then again. Maybe that’s just me…

Then a few days ago, I ran into a list of ‘universals of culture’ by George P Murdock. Now I hate generalizations but this list looks pretty good. As a matter of fact, I think it’s spot on—and certainly applies to many aspects of games, content, and social applications on mobile.

…age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, co-operative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control and weaving.

Some of these (weaving?) may be a tad less relevant today than when Murdoch wrote this in 1945 but I can’t think of a country I’ve ever been to where most of these aren’t true. And with high global migration—this stuff isn’t really defined by country anyhow. Depending on the group it can be regional, local or tribal—but also global—communicated and upheld over distances via devices like the mobile. Sure this global hodgepodge creates a blurring of culture but even MacDonalds realized long ago that serving halo-halo in the Philippines, koulouri in Greece and rice throughout much of Asia was more than just good for business. You can only disrupt culture so much before something has to give.

So—assuming you agree with Murdock’s list—why is the content available for download from our operators pretty much the same from country to country? You do find some variation in the area of ringtones (local music almost always trumps international brands) and wallpapers (esp. in areas of religious or inspirational sayings, depictions of beauty, use of colour etc.) But in games and applications—behold the mono-culture

• X-Men Legends II, Sexy Poker 2006, True Crime: Streets of LA, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, MahJong Solitaire, (Fido/Canada—you could argue that Mahjong is the closest to Canadian culture)
• Tower Bloxx, Jewel Quest, Bejeweled Deluxe (Verizon/US)
• Nuke Bowling, Paris Hitlon’s Diamond Quest, King Kong: The Official Mobile Game (Shinee/Thailand)
• Solitaire, Asterodz Field, Fishing Penguins (Morocco/via MediaPlaza, via Mobitween in France)
• Warriors of The Lion, Dragon Dreams, Gem Jam, Plasma Inferno (Airtel/India)
• Frogger, Blade, Velozes e Furiosos (Fast & Furious) Tokyo, Garfield Pinball, 24 Hours (Vivo, Brazil)
• Top Gun 2, Pirates, Road Kill, The Da Vinci Code (via PlayFon—operating in UK, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Baltic States)
• Serentity: Renegades, Tank Blox, Mickey Mahjong, Truck Tycoon (Smart-Tone-Vodaphone/Hong Kong)

Admittedly, I am being a tad sensationalist and I did choose games that would prove my point. But the sad fact is, it wasn’t at all hard to find them—even in high growth areas like the BRIC markets where you’d expect volume to drive local content industries. There are lots of American media and pop-culture brands, lots of console (repurposed to mobile) gaming brands, and lots of low-hanging (casual-game) fruit like Sudoku, Mahjong and Tetris. It’s also pretty easy to see that certain regions or countries seem to favour certain types of content—and it’s in these areas that the cultural differences are now showing—even with applications purchased through a global aggregator.

• Social applications to do with dating, horoscopes and luck seem more popular in certain regions than others.
• Storytelling via historical or folklore settings seems very popular in South Asia
• ‘Kawai’ or gaming-branded properties (Sanrio, San-X, Ragnarok, Pukka etc.) are popular throughout Asia.
• Hong Kong can’t seem to get enough re-purposing of Mahjong,
• Some local content does creep in, in the form of mass-media or sports brands (ex. Bollywood or cricket)
• Then there are differences in design, which are pretty easy to spot in content you know is developed locally (visual style, use of colour, representations of male and female interactions or social settings, anthropomorphism of game characters etc.)

So overall, I don’t think we’re doing all that well on Murdoch’s list. Most markets seem to be getting maybe 10-20% locally relevant content, another 10-20% regional or cross-ethnic content (ex. Moroccan operators buying from the French. Thai, Malay, Indonesian and Singapore operators buying from China or India to cater to their multi-ethnic populations)—and the rest is mostly (North American?) big brand entertainment.

If anything, applications currently fare a bit better since they’re sometimes merely containers for interaction in the form of (user-created) voice, text or photography. Which brings me to my original point. Voice and text are vital and there’s certainly lots of room to innovate in that area. But with 2.5 billion of us (and counting,) couldn’t we do so much more if given the opportunity to simply and economically create, distribute, monetize and market content locally?

[Note: I chose not to include Korea and Japan in this discussion. They have quite a bit of local content due to a variety of factors that no-one can seem to agree on but certainly has something to do with high mobile adoption, a content-friendly payment infrastructure, smart operators and more flexible authoring environments. These articles on iMode provide insight into some of this.]