Today's handheld gaming systems allow players to engage in multiplayer games via ad-hoc, wireless networking. They are also now sufficiently commonplace that it is possible to study how portability and ad-hoc wireless networking have affected the social gaming practices of owners of these systems. In this paper, we report findings from a qualitative study investigating the collocated multiplayer gaming practices of Nintendo DS owners. Based on interviews of nine DS owners and observations of three organized gaming events, we identified three major themes surrounding the social, multiplayer gaming practices of Nintendo DS users: renegade gaming, or the notion that users reappropriate contexts traditionally hostile to game play; pragmatic and social barriers to the formation of ad-hoc pick-up games, despite a clear desire for multiplayer, collocated gaming; and private gaming spheres, or the observation that the handheld device's form factor creates individual, privatized gaming contexts within larger social contexts. These findings lead to a set of implications for the design of future handheld gaming systems.

Novel key mappings, including chording, character prediction, and multi-tap, allow the use of fewer keys than those on a conventional keyboard to enter text. In this paper, we explore a text input method that makes use of rhythmic mappings of five keys. The keying technique averages 1.5 keystrokes per character for typical English text. In initial testing, the technique shows performance similar to chording and other multi-tap techniques, and our subjects had few problems with basic text entry. Five-key entry techniques may have benefits for text entry in multi-point touch devices, as they eliminate targeting by providing a unique mapping for each finger.