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 Following our earlier Nokia coverage, which included an interview with Nokia's director of games publishing, Gregg Sauter, and an editorial from Dr Mark Ollila, Director of Technology and Strategy and Head of Games Publishing, in this second interview with a Nokia executive, Games On Deck talks to Tomi Huttula, Head of Product Management for N-Gage at Nokia, about the new incarnation of N-Gage Arena.
GamesOnDeck: Describe the new N-Gage Arena to us.
Tomi Huttula: N-Gage Arena is the virtual place where the N-Gage community goes to play with each other, discuss in the message boards and live chats, share user created content and participate in activities, like tournaments and hosted events. Community players can also send/receive messages and game invitations, build up their profile page and share with their friends and other community players. By playing the games and participating in the N-Gage Arena activities, users can gather points and compare each other, all based on their level of activity and their interests. The Arena will soon be much more open and easier to access due to the many devices that will support N-Gage.
GOD: What does the new N-Gage Arena mean for mobile gamers, both those familiar with the original and not?
TH: he N-Gage Arena will be new in a sense of added functionality and ease of entry which is tied to the new N-Gage platform, but the core of it stays the same. It is still about community and about bringing the fun with the social aspect of the games for the customers. With the new N-Gage platform we are reaching millions of users around the world and therefore have focused on easing new users into the community and making it easy to be involved at whatever level you wish. We have a very loyal and active core community on the current platform. I believe those members will find it exciting to be able to keep their current profiles and the existing relationships when moving to the new platform. We will provide ways for the old members to be recognized by others as the real veterans of mobile connected gaming.
 
The N-Gage Arena Friends List
On the other hand, for the new members I expect it will be interesting for them to see that there is a real history of the N-Gage community in the form of the veteran members, who will be willing to share some stories from the trenches and hints & tips about mobile connected gaming. On the other hand we fully expect casual fans to utilize the community - for example it would be great to see a parent playing a multiplayer game with their child when they are apart, or comparing high scores. This is a community for the masses.
GOD: What lessons would you say Nokia has learned from the previous incarnation of N-Gage Arena for the new Arena?
TH: With the N-Gage Arena we can get really close to our end users which has created a valuable opportunity for us to listen, and serve them better. We have succeeded in building a really personal connection with a lot of our customers. Most of our community activities are hosted events. Some of them are scheduled virtual play dates, where players and our community personas come together to play a certain game and chat in between the game sessions. These events are run by our community personas like "redrum", "congested" and "ikona". In real life they are natural born gamers who really enjoy bringing the social aspect to the platform. The N-Gage Arena is run from our San Francisco office, and I can tell that the work desks there look pretty different from a typical Nokia employee's desk. Our personas have gathered a loyal fan base and that is really working both ways by getting N-Gage planners and our customers closer to each other.
The other related topic is that we have been able to turn the community into a great customer care tool. It is really different for people to get help from other community members or "congested", than from an automated voice answering service.
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