We are all guilty, sometimes, of treating “videogaming” as though it were a homogenous activity, understandable in general terms regardless of specific context. But of course this is not really true. Videogaming means something slightly different depending on whether you are doing it in an arcade, a chip shop, a cybercafe, at home, or in the park. And it’s the last possibility that often gets short theoretical shrift: the nature of handheld gaming.

Start with the sleek, silver GBA SP - which, after all, is where Nintendo itself should have started last year. The slightly retro plastic curves of the original GBA are replaced by something which really looks like a desirable piece of consumer electronics. Its clamshell form factor may remind veterans of the flip-lid dual-screen Game & Watches of the early 1980s, but it must also be taken as a direct challenge to Sony, resembling as it does one of that companies’ effortlessly desirable Clié palmtops. To flip open a sparkly new GBA SP on the train is no longer to make a bold statement along the lines of “I’m going to play with a toy right now”; for all the average non-gaming commuter suspects, you might be doing sales analysis with a portable spreadsheet program. (That is, as long as you have forked out for the cynically separate headphone adapter.) One could argue that we shouldn’t need to be embarrassed by gaming, that such cosmetic subterfuge ought not to be necessary, but this sea-change in hardware styling is more in the way of a belated acknowledgment that games have become an ordinary mass-market consumer industry, and not just an obsession for stunted adolescents.

That the GBA now has a functional screen, something which ordinarily might be considered a sine qua non for a successful handheld console, has brought me back to the timewarping opiate delights of Advance Wars, my favourite game on any format of last year, and also enabled a blissful immersion in A Link to the Past, which although largely a port of an old SNES game seems very close to one kind of handheld perfection. The character and environment design combine seemingly incompatible opposites: epic scale with delicious, loving characterisation, and complexity with clean and simple lines, the latter being especially important for our optical health; if staring at a 28-inch cathode-ray tube for hours is bad for the eyes, so much more so is peering at a two-and-a-half inch LCD.

But it seems reasonable to demand that a handheld game, above all, fit itself easily around the gamer’s other activities, and LttP’s lack of a save-anywhere option, although historically true to the beat-the-dungeon-in-one-go nature of the series, fails to accomplish this obligation. It has a sleep mode, but this is still battery-eating, and especially on the new rechargeable GBA SP may not preserve your gamestate for the kind of long hiatus that may be required by any ordinary emergency or responsibility of everyday life. When you sit down in front of a console with many videogames, you implicitly agree to a contract of a few hours’ interaction, but a device that is designed to be used on the move cannot demand such a commitment.

Phenomenologically, and as remains true with the GBA SP, handheld gaming has always been a kind of rebellion, a rejection of the environment, a solipsistic insistence on immersing oneself in a fantasy environment regardless of one’s physical surroundings. In that sense, it is like reading a novel, a socially acceptable form of such mental selfishness, and perhaps has pleasurable echoes of deceiving teachers at school by doing something other than paying attention to the blackboard. (Sneakily playing Snoopy Tennis during maths classes when I was 10 had the same insolent function as surreptitiously leafing through the new 2000AD under my desk.)

But newer developments in gaming on the move seek to change this relationship with the outside world so that virtual reality becomes a form of augmented reality. This is a process that arguably started with the invention of the Sony Walkman: your daily environment reimagined and recontextualised through music. Belgian company It’s Alive, for one (www.itsalive.com), is experimenting with games on mobile phones that use the location-tracking and mapping functions of cellular networks to provide a kind of multi-user dungeon whose environment is the streets of your actual city.

We hear a lot of noise about the explosion in mobile-phone gaming that is apparently forever just around the corner, but It’s Alive show that it’s not about playing old arcade ports on your Samsung, but about community and connection, even with ageing technology - their Botfighters game, which is a bit like paintball using SMS texting, recently launched in Russia and had users sending 3 million SMS messages within six weeks. So convergence, long hyped but never seen in many parts of the digital industry, may finally be happening with handheld devices. Nokia’s N-Gage gaming phone is a hideously ugly and overpriced piece of design, but it’s a telling statement of intent. If Sony ever launches it’s much-rumoured handheld, meanwhile, it would be surprising if the unit’s capabilities were not informed by the company’s business in handheld computers.

And Microsoft’s PocketPC handheld format, too, is finding favour with small videogame developers. This month I bought a Dell Axim, partly as one of my regular and inevitably doomed attempts to organise my life in a more professional manner, but really so I could play chess with PocketGrandmaster and muck about with grooves on soft-synth application Griff Music Studio. Then I discovered that Jeff Minter’s ageless classic Deflex is available on the machine for a mere fiver; there is a remarkably slick and fun RTS called Strategic Assault available from handango.com; and other garage codeshops are busy writing everything from text adventures to C64 emulators for the system. Something like this device seems is the way things are going; and of course it looks even more “normal” in public than Nintendo’s redesigned machine.

For many years now, videogaming has been a normal choice of living-room entertainment; and the emergence of convergent handheld devices will extend this spur-of-the-moment option to people on the move. The GBA SP, in fact, may well be the last dedicated, non-networked portable videogame console we shall ever see. It’s nice, Nintendo, but it’s not the future.

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