New Scientist is reporting that the gaming company Artificial Life is readying an immersive MMORPG that will run on 3G cell phones. The game will let players assume a virtual persona and travel through a futuristic cityscape, chatting and interacting with computer-controlled characters as well as other human players while trying to solve puzzles that can be solved more easily through cooperation. I’m trying to get my head around how well that would work on a small phone screen, but Artifical Life’s CEO is very bullish on 3G games and entertainment:

“The future for mobile entertainment and games lies in this kind of sophisticated, massive multi-player games,” says CEO of Artificial Life, Eberhard Schoenebur. “This is what the 3G mobile carriers need to attract customers.”

This could get pretty interesting as mobile games begin to incorporate location-based phone technology to do things like blend real video footage with computer graphics. A rudimentary proof-of-concept was recently developed at the University of Singapore, where a version of the classic game Pac-Man was created that uses 3D graphics superimposed over real city streets. A telling comment at the end of the New Scientist article may shed a little more light on where this is headed, noting that Artificial Life hopes its mobile multiplayer game will provide a popular way of meeting new people and maybe even become a novel dating tool.
(Thanks Brian!)