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Atari Co-Founder: Mobile Games Make Me Want To Throw My Phone (theguardian.com)
Will Freeman, reporting for The Guardian (condensed): One industry veteran sees arcades and mobile gaming as almost indistinct. He is Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari. Often referred to as the godfather of video games (a phrase he dislikes), he is just about to make his debut in mobile game development, having established a partnership with Dutch publisher Spil, where he will help deliver at least three as-yet-unnamed titles. "When you look at mobile and arcade gaming, they're identical," Bushnell says. "Mobile has some of the same game constraints for the player, and that 'easy to learn, and difficult to master' metric." [...] "Generally, a tremendous number of mobile games are poorly designed," he says. "They can be so focused on graphics that they forget they have to get the timing right, and they have to have proper scoring constructs. I have been so pissed off with some mobile games I've wanted to throw my phone, even if I'm only going to hurt my phone there, and not the game."
Firstly, arcade games have a physical joystick and buttons which allows for high skill games, while mobile games have to do with imprecise touch screens with laggy input, which limits how challenging you can make the game (which is why most mobile games are dumbed down crap).
Secondly, arcade games allowed for other novel forms of input, such as light gun games, dancing games, and racing games where're physically on a jet ski or motorcycle and are leaning to steer. Mobile games don't offer anything like that.
Thirdly, arcades were as much about the social experience as they were about the gameplay. You'd be playing a fighting game and someone would come along and challenge you to a match. You'd get to know them and you'd meet the same people on a regular basis. I'm extremely unsociable but I always enjoyed the social site of the arcade.
The only comparison between mobile and arcade is that both can burn through your money at an alarming rate, but at least in the arcade you were having fun while most mobile games try to exploit human psychology to get you addicted to doing boring and repetitive tasks in exchange for a false sense of achievement.
Comparing mobile games to arcades is frankly an insult.