Steven Johnson's article in Slate "Geeks Without Borders" profiles an actual live (commercial) mobile game. In the U.S., no less:

San Francisco's North Beach has a long history of eccentric street culture, but if you find yourself in the neighborhood this Saturday, you are likely to witness a new twist: small groups of people clustering together to read text off of cell-phone screens, then embarking on some kind of oddball group activity—retrieving a suitcase that's been hidden atop a tree, persuading strangers to try on insane outfits—and then huddling together again to peer at their cell phones. This strange behavior is part of something called the Go Game, the creation of a company called Wink Back, Inc. (The next public game is scheduled for Feb. 22.) The game's creators scatter clues and tools across the city, and then wirelessly transmit a series of challenges to the teams as they prowl the streets.

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It's urban Survivor with cell phones.

Steven mentions other immersive games, too, including It's Alive (although it seems their site is down right now), which was mentioned in the Rheingold's Smart Mobs (it's amazing that Mobs was published in 2002, and many of the great ideas profiled there have still not appeared stateside, or are just getting traction).

It seems to me that the creators of the Go Game, Wink Back, have a smart approach -- it's not just a game on a phone, but a game that is tied closely to mobility and actual location. The game isn't forced to live within the phone -- the phone is a vehicle for game play, say like the little 2x3 cards on a gameboard. The game itself is the city, and it interacting with others, including (it seems to me) hired ringers who facilitate the activity and fun in the real world. Hopefully I can find out more about this -- simple idea, but brilliant execution.

Linda Tischler's "The Beauty of Simplicity", from the November 2005 issue of Fast Company has a few nice stories and thoughts about technology and the battle between complexity and usability:

Here is how (Marissa) Mayer (Google's director of consumer Web products) thinks about the tension between complexity of function and simplicity of design: "Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful."

And a great observation attributed to MIT's John Maeda:

On one level, he says, the problem is simply one of scale. Before computer technology, small things were simple; big things were more likely complex. But the microchip changed that. Now small things can be complex, too. But small objects have less room for instruction--so we get cell phones with tip calculators buried deep in submenus and user manuals the size of the Oxford English Dictionary to help us figure it all out.

Think of all the complexity in a airplane cockpit squeezed into your phone, and perhaps we have an image for all the power and features and complexity that could be brought to bear on the modern mobile. And with apps like Mologogo we've struggled with coming up with a feature rich, yet simple interface -- no small feat. Trying to develop along the paradigm of the modern desktop (the Windows/Mac UI + mouse + menus) for the phone seems like a foolish pursuit, no matter how well you do it will always feel small, cramped and crippled.

This may be an effective thought excerise regarding application features and any resulting UI: think about how you would build the same features in the era of tubes and hardware -- just how much of a monolith would it be? Replace each UI button with a real button, each mouse click with a toggle switch. How much heat would it generate, how much solder would you need, how many steel panels, how many sides? And how imposing would it be to use? Those dinosaurs, like the glorious old RCA Mark II that was housed up at Prentis Hall at the Columbia/Princeton electronic music center, are amazingly quaint to see today. Like some kind of Totoro-like benevolent form of monstrous wildlife.

Perhaps people don't typically treat a phone as something that we interact with so much as simply talk to. We're not looking for a conversation or interaction with a phone, or installed phone applications -- and what I mean by that isn't that the phone shouldn't or doesn't enable us to communicate: we're most apt to use the phone to "transport" us to another place to be (in conversation) with another human being. I could care less that it's a phone or a block of wood or a silver amulet.

Ubiquitous computing doesn't arrive until the computer -- or perhaps an object imbued with the sense of "technology" as the new and not-yet-commonplace -- disapears from view.

Thanks to Kottke for the link, and digging out the money quote.

Whether or not you agree with Bill Joy (cofounder of Sun and currently with Kleiner Perkins), he is undeniably a fascinating guy. I'm drawn to his writings and interviews, for his sense of humour and sometimes bewildering brilliance.

In this interview available on AlwaysOn, Joy describes different "types of webs", as related to the modality of the user experience. We've certainly heard the concepts about "lean-forward"/"near-web" or "lean-back"/"far-web" (which Steven Johnson attributes to Jobs in his most excellent book "Everything Bad is Good For You"). Joy describes these, and a few more:

"Then there is the far experience, which is that you are leaning back in more of an entertainment mode. It is a different way of experiencing the information. The near experience today is the web through your favorite browser, and the far experience, the passive one, is watching television but the active and interactive one is really video games. We were thinking about the near and the far user interface and really the near web and the far web—because the kind of content you have, the way you interact, your whole body position, your energy, what you want in those two different environments are very different."

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"...we really liked what Wayne had said and [thought] there is more: There is also the here web, and the here web is the web to your mobile device because it's here, always with you. "

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"Near, far, and here. The modality of the near web is mouse and bitmap display and menus, and that is the way we've done that. The modality of the far web tends to be joysticks and maybe gestures more generally or some interaction of pushing buttons—whatever we do in when we're playing games or interacting with entertainment. The modality of the here web is still evolving. Mostly it is a touch screen like on my Treo or cursor buttons up and down. It's voice intensive, and it's very personalized, and the screen format is very small. So the kind of information you have on these three webs is very different, and the style you use to interact with them is very different. To us, these seemed to be three very different modalities, three different markets. And then there is clearly a fourth."

Link to read more about the "Weird Web" and the rest of the article.