Honours Thesis

The Rhetoric of Play: Locative Gaming and the Global City by

Dale Leorke

Supervised by Associate Professor Scott McQuire

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS PROGRAM SCHOOL OF CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE:

B.A. (HONS) MEDIA AND COMMUNICATIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

October 2008

Locative Gaming and the Global City

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Abstract In early discussions of digital networks, many theorists tended to distinguish between the material world of physical space, and the immaterial realm of cyberspace. But today we are increasingly seeing these two spaces converge as mobile technologies, locative media and digital networks collide with the physical architecture of contemporary cities. Previously separate and disconnected places are being absorbed into the networked space superimposed onto them, creating a ‘hybrid space’ embedded simultaneously in the local and the global. This embeddedness has created the potential for individuals living in these cities to intervene and interact in its public space. This thesis examines one manifestation of these interventions: ‘locative gaming’, or games which are located simultaneously in the physical world, and the virtual space of the game world. These games create their own rules that enable public play, but they must also navigate the rules of the real world, including its laws, social norms, and physical boundaries. As such, I argue these games must create their own ‘rhetoric of play’ to confront the constraints imposed on them from above, and develop a form of play which encourages participation and social relations, while taking into account the unique cultural dimensions of the local places in which they are performed.

Acknowledgements This thesis could not have been written without the guidance of my supervisor and reader, Scott McQuire. Many of the ideas and discussions in this paper came from our conversations and his seemingly limitless knowledge of, and passion for, media, architecture, and sociology. My understanding of these fields was greatly broadened as a result, and I would like to thank him for taking me on as thesis supervisor. I would also like to thank all the staff and academics in the Media and Communications Program at Melbourne Uni for making this research possible. In particular, I must thank Robert Hassan, for his helpful early contributions, and Tom Apperley, who suggested this topic to me and as such introduced me to the wonderful practice of locative gaming. Finally, thankyou to my parents, Joy and Brendon, for their limitless support and encouragement during my undergraduate studies at University, and to Ashlee, Vince, Nick, Malorie, Adrian, and Reese, all of whom were there for me throughout.


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Table of Contents: Introduction: Networked Media and the Liquid City

Hypothesis and Structure of the Thesis

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Ch 1 Hybrid Space: Cities, Networks, and Urbanism

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Digital Networks and the Splintering of Urban Space

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Locative Gaming at the ‘Frontier Zones’ of Cities

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Ch 2 Public Space and the Rhetoric of Play

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Regulating the City: Boundaries, Networks, and Power

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Strategies and Tactics in the Creative City

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Ch 3 Net Culture/Locative Culture: Beyond the Ludic City

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Project Blinkenlights as Interaction, Participation, and Public Interface

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Mogi, Mastery, and the Social Mobile Game

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Conclusion

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Endnotes

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List of Figures

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References

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Introduction: Networked Media and the Liquid City To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Centre is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets...nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences...His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. -- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 92)

The city of Bradford is located in West Yorkshire, England, and lays claim to being the home of the novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. In 2004, after a controversial city architect proposed building a lake in the middle of the city, Bradford became the centre of a radical urban planning project that encouraged its residents to participate in rebuilding the city centre by constructing new buildings, tearing down existing ones, and reshaping the city as they saw fit. This project, known as PlastiCity, remodelled Bradford into an everyday SimCity, transforming the familiar terrain of the city into a completely malleable playground. Needless to say, this did not take place within the city itself, but rather inside a virtual replica of Bradford, a digital game which allowed its residents to experience their city from multiple perspectives and alter its architecture to suit their individual desires. For as long as the modern city has existed, there has been the dream of a ‘liquid city’. The desire to explore the city as a ludic landscape, to be able to remould it from the ground up rather than ‘from above’, has become a recurring theme in the postindustrial era. Pioneers of the preindustrial planning era such as Baron Haussmann reimagined modern cities as a ‘unitary space’ belonging to a collective, ‘egalitarian’ society. But within the social fabric of these cities there existed fractures and multiplicities, ruptures and boundaries. As Walter Benjamin (1999: n.p.) once wrote: ‘In no other place—with the exception of dreams—can the phenomenon of the border be experienced in such a pristine form as in cities’. For Michel de Certeau (1984), cities were a ‘concept’ created by governments and institutions who sought


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to render its heterogeneous terrain as a cohesive whole. Walking in the city is a way of confronting these borders, of experiencing the diversity and unpredictability of urban space and challenging the city-concept. The liquid city encapsulates this desire: to live in an urban space whose architecture constantly evolves according to the whims and desires of its inhabitants, rather than those of its authorities. The liquid city remains a utopian fantasy, but the advent of digital media and its integration into the contemporary city are bringing that fantasy closer to reality. PlastiCity is one of a growing number of projects which demonstrate the complex, multifarious changes currently taking place in cities as a result of globalisation and digitisation. Although the city it digitally recreates remains tethered to the material world, the game renders its space as a liquid architecture located inside an immaterial networked space, allowing players to examine from every angle the city in which they live. It is a fitting demonstration of the potential for networked media to transform the space of the contemporary city. Digital networks are increasingly superimposed onto physical places, making them malleable, controllable, and partially ‘liquefied’. This liquefaction partly realises de Certeau’s desire to immerse oneself in everyday space, to be grasped by its unpredictable flows and dynamics; but paradoxically, those networks potentially impose even more pervasive mechanisms for the regulation of public space by authorities. As a result, we are seeing struggles, interventions, and new forms of participation taking place amongst the citizens and authorities within these cities. In this thesis, I investigate one manifestation of these interventions: the practice of ‘locative gaming’, or gameplay in everyday space which is embedded simultaneously in the local architecture and terrain of that space, and the virtual cyberspace which exists within the networked ‘space of flows’. ‘Play’ is often seen as a way of circumventing the boredom and functionality of everyday life, of engaging with an alternate universe situated outside the boundaries of reality and circumscribed with its own rules and logic. As such, I explore the potential for locative games to bring what I call the ‘rhetoric of play’ to the spaces of the contemporary city, to navigate the regulations imposed on them while involving their inhabitants in forms of interaction and participation made possible by the existence of a digital, networked gamespace.


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Hypothesis and Structure of the Thesis The aim of this thesis is to locate these games within the historical, social, political, and technological transformations that are currently taking place in cities around the world. Locative gaming did not appear out of nowhere, nor is it the only practice made possible by the networking of social space. My argument concerns one way in which locative gaming came into being through a set of specific material conditions that are part of the broader process of globalisation. This means, above all, turning towards the ‘global cities’ which have emerged at the apex of globalisation, and which increasingly embody its impact on contemporary society. Global cities are the locally embedded sites through which the world economy is controlled, the multinational corporations which dominate its cityscape are managed, and international organisations such as the UN and EU operate (Brenner and Keil, 2006; Sassen, 2001; Short, 2004). But they are also places where the convergence between local places and global networks is most visible. The spaces of the global city are enmeshed within a complex interface of networks that stretch across its vast geography, fracturing those sites into a fragmented, multidimensional space. They are a ‘hybrid space’, existing simultaneously in the local and global, the physical and digital. They are the sites where the socio-technological effects of globalisation and digitisation are made material. These are the sites where new possibilities for play in the public realm have emerged, taking place at the intersection between physical and networked space. For this thesis, I have chosen the term ‘locative gaming’ to describe this practice. The word ‘locative’, from the Latin ‘locus’, is used grammatically to indicate something is already located ‘at’ or ‘in’ a place, as opposed to going there. The phrase ‘to go into the city’, for instance, is commonly used by citydwellers instead of ‘to go to the city’; they are always already ‘located’ within the boundaries of the city. I seem to be one of the few using this term; more commonly, ‘location-based gaming’ is used to describe games which ‘incorporate a user’s geographical location into gameplay’ (Thomas, 2006: 44). The problem with this term is that locationbased gaming can simply refer to playacting in the real world: for instance, when I was in primary school, like many children at that age I invited my friends over to play various games in my backyard. Sometimes these games would include generic rules (using a toy gun to ‘shoot’ opponents) and specific rules (giving certain ‘weapons’ limitations, like ammunition) and even a vague narrative (good vs. evil). These games could potentially be described as


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‘location-based games’, since they involved a game with rules and objectives based in a real location.1 Locative games, in contrast, are only made possible by the intersection between a physical location and the virtual space of digital networks. I argue, therefore, that the universe of locative games is a hybrid space: a real geographical terrain overlaid with virtual items, rules, and scenarios. In this sense, locative gaming not only appropriates physical space for gameplay purposes; it radically transfigures that place by merging it with the networked environment. Saskia Sassen describes this process as ‘hypermobilisation’: when a local object or place comes into contact with networked space, parts of it become liquefied, gaining the potential for ‘instantaneous circulation through digital networks with global span’ (2006a: 344). Although these objects remain in their local context, they are nonetheless transfigured, transformed and mobilised through the process of digitisation. Similarly, locative gaming transforms the physical environment, incorporating it into the digital gamespace. It is still reducible to its material components—the buildings, streets, people, fences, and street signs that exist in that space—but these ‘concrete’ objects are transported through globally connected networks and interact with other liquid objects inside that space. This does not mean, however, that they can only be considered within the context of the game. Although the components of that location are transported into the networked realm, they are still subject to the laws, norms, and physical boundaries which regulate our behaviour in the real world. Locative games must therefore take into account its specific architectural, social, and political dimensions, in addition to the rules of the game. As Lawrence Lessig writes, ‘in real space, laws regulate through constitutions and statutes; in cyberspace, code is the law which regulates the hardware and software of the virtual world’ (2006: 5). Locative games are simultaneously regulated by the laws of the real world, and the rules of the game code. These laws are not passively absorbed into the game; they actively limit and hinder gameplay, inscribing it with layers of control and regulation—both visible and hidden, conscious and unconscious—which determine how it is performed. While this places certain constraints on locative games, it also means that, rather than remaining static and stable, they are constantly mediated through the specific social and cultural conditions of those spaces; and their rules can and must be adapted accordingly.


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In this thesis, then, I investigate the micro-level practices involved in the performance of locative gaming, while remaining aware of the macro conditions which culminated in its existence. It is not a definitive account of the many unique and remarkable manifestations of these games—all of which possess their own characteristics that challenge public space in different ways. Nor is it a complete theorisation of the many historical, technological, and social processes involved, but merely one contribution to the existing literature of current theorists whose extensive efforts I have built on. In the first chapter, I provide a theoretical overview of the conditions which have made locative gaming possible, beginning with the rollout of digital networks in cities which has resulted in ruptures and openings within the space of the city. Chief among these openings are the hybrid spaces which enable previously disempowered individuals to participate in new forms of public interaction. In the second chapter, I focus on the rules and conventions which regulate these spaces, and the rhetorical tactics and techniques employed by certain locative games to navigate them. In the final chapter, drawing on a close analysis of locative games including Project Blinkenlights and Mogi, I suggest locative games can be understood as ‘public interfaces’ engrained not only within architectural space, but also within the social and cultural milieu of contemporary cities.


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Chapter One Hybrid Space: Cities, Networks, and Urbanism Like blades, the engineers’ iron structures chopped up the body of the city, fragmenting the urban tissue...The image of a metropolis was laid bare in the multilayered movement and omnipresent bridges that...connect[ed] the isolated objects of the cut–open city. -- Fritz Neumeyer’s recollection of Berlin during the 1920s (1992: 24)

This quote from the German musician Fritz Neumeyer provides a surprisingly apt starting point for my discussion of the changes currently taking place in cities. Today, we are seeing cities once conceived as distinct geographical locations becoming increasingly connected to one another through the internet and its vast expanse of information flows. The idea of a unified modern city is giving way to ‘hybrid cities’ made up of two separate but interconnected spaces: the material sites and locations of the city, and the space of the networked information economy that interacts and intersects with these sites. For Nuemeyer, Berlin’s urban landscape was torn asunder during the industrialisation period almost a century ago, suddenly exposing its inner workings to its inhabitants and revealing previously hidden and ‘invisible’ parts of the city. As digital networks are today superimposed onto the physical locations of cities, they too create new opportunities for individuals to engage with public sites and previously concealed urban spaces. These opportunities, however, are far from even and are bound up in the social and political circumstances that characterise these local places. Contemporary cities are now more than ever highly contested sites, involving struggles among groups and individuals for control over the spaces of the city. Locative gaming is inescapably entangled in the struggles currently taking place in these cities. Although locative projects each have different technical and social goals in mind when they are first conceived and performed, they all rely on the intersection between local sites and networked digital space. As such, they cannot easily escape the constantly evolving


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social and political tensions taking place in those sites. This chapter addresses these tensions by looking at the historical, social, and technological processes that led to the emergence of hybrid space. It provides a conceptual and theoretical overview of the conditions that preceded locative gaming by introducing themes that I explore in subsequent chapters. I begin with Castells’ (2000) account of the network society, which provides us with a general vocabulary to discuss the impact of digital networks on the social construction of cities. I then draw on the work of theorists such as Sassen (2006a, b, 2007) and Graham and Marvin (2001) whose work in this area focuses on the effects of digitisation at the micro level, and the uneven and unintended consequences its rollout is having for individuals living in these cities—of which locative gaming is only one of many.

Digital Networks and the Splintering of Urban Space Manual Castells provides one of the most influential and compelling accounts of the ‘material embeddedness’ of digital networks in The Rise of the Network Society, the first volume in his trilogy on the information society. One of Castells’ greatest insights in this work is to recognise that, even though digital networks make possible an immaterial realm that exists outside the spatial and temporal dimensions of the real world, this realm remains embedded in the physical infrastructure and local places where those networks are situated. For this reason, Castells argues our contemporary society is divided between two ‘spatial logics’: the ‘space of places’, and the ‘space of flows’. The former refers to the material places of society in which human agency, experience, and memory are located, while the space of flows consists of an ‘ahistorical’ and location-less virtual realm that exists in networked cyberspace (2000: 408-9). Although these two spatial logics are interdependent, for Castells the decisions and policies that govern our material world are increasingly shifting into networked space, creating a fundamental disjuncture and asymmetry between the two realms. This asymmetry threatens to widen the divide between the relative few who exercise control over the space of flows, and the vast majority who live in the places of the city (2000: 458). As political and economic decision-making gradually moves into networked space, the physical places of cities are becoming increasingly isolated from one another and from their traditional role as the facilitators of social relations and the decision-making process. As a result, Castells argues, the immaterial world of networked space is increasingly displacing the specificity and locality of physical space:


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The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aimed at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other...Unless cultural, political, and physical bridges are deliberately built between the two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace (2000: 459; original emphasis).

As Robert Hassan (2007) observes, the space of flows is not only asymmetrically opposed to the real world, but it is also ‘asynchronous’: it is not governed by the ‘logic of the clock’ that demarcates time in the real world, but by what Castells calls the ‘timeless time’ of networks. One consequence of this temporal rupture has been the emergence of a 24-hour global economy, whereby once disparate cities located in different geographies and time zones are able to enter a parallel networked space freed from the temporal and spatial constraints of the real world. For Castells, these ‘global cities’ most radically signify the disjuncture between networked space and the real world, since the operations of the world economy take place mostly in ‘command and control centres able to coordinate, innovate, and manage the intertwined activities of networks of firms’, which exist purely as immaterial knowledge and ‘information flow’ (2000: 409). While Castells’ macro-level account of the conditions that led to the emergence and eventual ‘dominance’ of networked space are insightful, his analysis only offers a starting point for any discussion of its impact at the micro-level of the everyday practices that take place in these cities. The ascendance of ‘global cities’ and technocratic political institutions provides some evidence that, at the elite, institutional level, there is an enormous gap between everyday people and those who control the information that flows through networked space. At the micro level, however, this division is much less clear and easily defined. The separation between physical and networked space is greatly diminished when we move into the public sites of cities, where digital networks are becoming increasingly integrated into its physical architecture and infrastructure. Mobile phones, notebook computers, and GPSenabled devices are redefining the way we navigate physical space. Portable entertainment like MP3 players and handheld videogame consoles create new forms of connectivity amongst users. And the miniaturisation of computer technologies means they are ‘moving from the explicit realm of interface to the tacit architectures of houses, buildings, and environments’ in the form of ‘locative media’ devices such as tollway scanners, climate


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control systems, and radio frequency ID (RFID) tags (Hawk and Rieder, 2008: xiv-xv). Far from the ‘strict separation’ between real and virtual space that Castells posits, as Eric Kluitenberg suggests ‘all technological and social trends clearly indicate that these two “spheres” are becoming more and more closely interwoven’ (2006: 10). Rather than viewing the digital and non-digital as two separate realms, then, I propose that networked space is instead gradually converging with physical space, overlapping and intersecting with the objects, architecture, and people within it. This intersection is not fixed and stable, but ‘creates a highly unstable system, uneven and constantly changing’ (Kluitenberg, 2006: 8). Saskia Sassen (2001, 2006a) offers one of the most detailed analyses so far of this convergence between the physical and digital in her sweeping account of globalisation and the rise of global cities. For Sassen, the process of globalisation is partial, fractious, and uneven. The move from a ‘national’ to ‘global’ assemblage takes place within nations, meaning that although a global world order is now possible, most truly international activities still occur inside specific nation-states (2006a: 5; see also Appadurai, 1996; Moreno, 2000; Rosenau, 2003). Similarly, global networks that stretch across state borders and territories are dependent on a vast network of physical infrastructure which is situated in local sites. As such, ‘there is no purely digital economy and no completely virtual corporation or community’—they remain firmly embedded in localised, material places (2006a: 341). This means that although networked space is essentially immaterial, location-less and global, the hardware on which it is built—computers, servers, telephone exchanges, backbone networks and intranet networks— remain subject to local laws and varying forms of ownership and control. Electronic space, for instance, makes the existence of a global financial market possible, but the actual institutions, buildings, and financial centres that make up the world economy are regulated by local laws, economic conditions, and the decisions of individual managers or boards, well as some international laws (Sassen, 2006a: 336-8). These local centres thus become embedded in global networks, making them subject to constraints and conditions at both the local and global levels simultaneously.2 As a result, this interconnectivity between local, material places and digital networks is fracturing cities into a ‘hybrid space’. This hybrid space exists simultaneously on two distinct but interwoven planes—physical places that remain tethered to their local customs, traditions, laws, and socio-political conditions; and the electronic networked space superimposed onto these places. This interdependence is radically displacing the traditional boundaries between


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the local and global, but in ways that are extremely uneven and fractious. For example, while the world economy is largely controlled through several key global cities (London, New York, and Tokyo), its operations are scattered and dispersed across multiple local centres that are regulated by local conditions, but become intertwined with the global financial market. In stark contrast to Castells’ suggestion that networked space merely imposes its logic over social space, then, I argue that the local embeddedness of digital networks means their activities are instead entwined within conditions at both levels. As a result, not only are local sites absorbed into networked spaces with global span, but as Sassen (2007) suggests, the reverse is also occurring—a point I shall return to momentarily. This displacement has significantly altered the way urban space is designed and constructed, especially in the ‘global cities’ where the interconnectedness between the local and global is perhaps most advanced. As Graham and Marvin (2001) argue, digital networks are unravelling the previously standardised, centralised architecture of cities. The carefully constructed modernist layout of urban space founded on Haussmann’s ‘renovation’ of Paris in the late 19th century is rapidly ‘disintegrating’ as cities are fragmented and splintered into ‘a largely disconnected series of economic and corporate spaces and spheres’ (2001: 305). For them, this is not merely an effect of the technology itself, but the neoliberal ideology that became dominant in policymaking circles following the 1980s: the previous system in which governments provided their citizens with essential services was replaced with an ‘infrastructural individualism’ where users pay for the services they want (2001: 136). This created a fundamental division in cities between those who can afford telephone services, faster broadband, and access to networks, and those who couldn’t, splintering the city into a series of isolated and disconnected enclaves. In this sense, global cities have come to materially embody the broader effects of globalisation and the convergence of physical and networked space. They can be seen as microcosms for the displacement created by the integration of local places into digital networks, and the many consequences and possibilities that this entails.

Locative Gaming at the ‘Frontier Zones’ of Cities In her essay ‘Cities as Frontier Zones’, Sassen (2007) argues that contemporary cities have become the ‘frontier zones’, or strategic sites, where these current, ongoing tensions between local and global, state and non-state, come to the fore. As Scalmer (2002) observes, cities


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have traditionally provided political actors with a strategic space for ‘symbolic performances’ such as protests and demonstrations that promote political movements—whether over socioeconomic disadvantage, immigration, women’s rights, or gay rights. But, according to Sassen (2006a: 316), cities of the late 19th century onwards were gradually deprived of their ‘strategic function’ as the sites for innovation and creativity. They were transformed into the functional centres of industrialisation as factories, administration centres, and industrial architecture dominated the cityscape—a period characterised by Graham and Marvin as the shift from ‘compact commercial cities’ to the ‘industrial metropolis’ (2001: 40). Although the networking of contemporary cities has meant they have largely recovered their ‘pivotal roles as central arenas of capital accumulation, technological innovation, and financial and economic development’ (Graham and Guy, 2005: 33; see also Florida, 2005a, b), the neoliberal policies that made this possible have left cities splintered into multiple, disparate economic enclaves. According to Sassen, ‘these cities contain a diversity of under-used spaces, often characterised more by memory than current meaning. These spaces are part of the interiority of a city, yet lie outside its organising, utility-driven logics and spatial frames’ (Sassen, 2006b: 19). It is these spaces—most visible and exposed in global and ‘second-tier’ cities such as Berlin, Singapore, San Francisco, Melbourne and Sydney—which have been opened to highly mobile and networked citizens from all backgrounds to participate in, and re-engage with, the public life of their city. As the innovation centres that drive the global economy return to cities, the ‘zones’ outside those centres have been opened to their newly networked citizens, providing them with a platform to act out struggles within the public spaces of the city. Interaction with these ‘under-used’ spaces relies on their embeddedness within networked infrastructure: they are situated in the ultra-connected and mobile centres of global cities located at the epicentre of the networked information economy. This interconnectivity enables them to be lifted out of their local context and transported into global networks. The physical space, and the material objects within it, become partially liquefied and rendered inside virtual cyberspace; they are then able to move across electronic space in their digital form and come into contact with other ‘liquid’ objects that might be physically located in different areas in the same city, or in cities around the world. In the process, they are partially removed from that context as they gain ‘hypermobility’ in the networked realm. The ‘local’ thus becomes a ‘microenvironment with global span’:


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Much of what we keep representing and experiencing as something local—a building, an urban place, a household, an activist organisation right there in our neighbourhood—is actually located not only in the concrete places where we can see them, but also on digital networks that span the globe. They are connected with other such localised buildings, organisations, households, possibly at the other side of the world (Sassen, 2007: no page).

These local spaces are never fully dislocated from their physical location. Instead, they exist in both places simultaneously: they remain bound to the concrete, physical environment that we experience in the real world, but at the same time they are represented in the alternate universe of networked space which is located outside both material space and time. This move into an ahistorical, location-less space of flows creates new possibilities for individuals to organise collective agency at the local level in cities—in the form of political resistance coordinated from inside ‘network time’; groups who appropriate public sites for networked play; or spectacles that incorporate multiple disconnected sites into a public performance (see Arns, 2004; Dietz, 2008; Hassan, 2007; Kluitenberg, 2008; McQuire, 2008). As a consequence, the imbrication of the local and global within the urban spaces of networked cities has created the conditions for public interventions to take place that challenge, explore, or confront conventional notions of public space. In many instances, they are supported by networked ‘locative media’ such as mobile phones and GPS- or WiFienabled devices linked to a network situated elsewhere. However, I want to be clear that these spaces are not what some theorists term ‘augmented space’, or ‘physical spaces overlaid with dynamically changing information...[that] is often localised for each user’ (Manovich, 2005: n.p.). This would suggest that they are simply latent networks ready to be activated at any time by the actions of individuals. Rather, these sites are inextricably caught up in the various regulations and forms of control that actively constrain our experience in every area of the contemporary city. Indeed, as Scott McQuire points out, the liquefaction of cities equally enables even more pervasive forms of surveillance and restrictions to be integrated into lived space and controlled from remote locations (2008: 89). As such, any interventions that take place in these hybrid spaces must simultaneously work around the physical conditions that are unique to that site, which means everything from its architectural design


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and layout to the laws, regulations, and political circumstances that determine our actions in public space. These spaces, then, become ‘frontier zones’ where citizens living in networked cities act out struggles and contestations at the local level which have been made possible by the vast restructuring of power as a result of globalisation, neoliberalism, and the emergence of digital networks. As I have chosen to demonstrate in this essay, though, these interventions do not have to be politically oriented. Often they are simply about forming a networked collective among a group of people with common interests who choose to appropriate a particular public space in the city for their own purposes. These performances may be less about making a political point or raising a social issue, and instead contain their own internal, constitutive goals. These goals take the form of guidelines or ‘rules’ written into networked hardware or software; those rules are then superimposed onto a physical location, shaping and determining the way it is used. The most common and widespread form these performances take are what I call ‘locative games’: games that are located within a particular material space, but whose rules are predetermined by their creators and exist inside the networked devices that each participant possesses. These games can be as simple as acting out a prescribed game formula, as in the case of shoot-and-‘kill’ games like GunSlingers (Mikoishi, 2002) and BotFighters (It’s Alive!, 2002); or they can be item-collection games with continuous gameplay and community-building elements like Mogi (Castelli, 2003).3 Regardless of their rules or goals, however, they are all simultaneously embedded in specific local sites, as well as the virtual networked space which brings those otherwise disconnected sites together. This means that whether or not they deliberately challenge the rules and conventions of those sites, they are inescapably caught up in the social and political circumstances unique to each location; and must actively navigate or confront these as they are performed. Locative games, then, are made possible by the convergence of networked and physical space, and the availability of public places in the city that have been made visible or accessible by their integration into global networks. These games have their own rules that are internal to the game and its participants, but they are superimposed onto the public spaces chosen for that particular project or performance. These rules alter the activities inside that space as it is incorporated into the virtual universe of the game; however, its physical architecture, as well as the laws and social conventions that constrain our actions within it, in


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turn limit and determine how the game is performed. As a consequence, participants must often employ rhetorical ‘tactics’ in order to negotiate these rules and constraints. In the next chapter, I discuss how this interconnectivity between local places and networked space affects locative gaming, and ask: to what extent can these games counter the various strategies of ownership and control imposed on them from above?


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Chapter Two Public Space and the Rhetoric of Play [Hiro’s] blade doesn’t have the power to cut a hole in the wall...but it does have the power to penetrate things. Avatars do not have that power. That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow. -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992: 407)

On July 28, 1957 the Situationist International was officially formed, led by the young, charismatic French philosopher Guy Debord. The SI is regarded as one of the most radical and revolutionary attempts to reappropriate the spaces of the modern city for the purpose of ‘play’. For them, the architecture of cities had become little more than a means for controlling the behaviour of its citizens, by concentrating roads, suburbs, and public transport lines around the centres of production and economic activity. As Sadler observes, ‘functionalism and mass production, once embraced as ways of delivering innovative “good design” to the masses, seemed to have gradually merged with the productivist values of capitalism’ (1998: 6). This functionalism overtly and subconsciously restricts how citydwellers navigate urban space: we move along a series of patterned, predictable axes that lead us to wherever we study, live, or work, making sure that we rarely stray from our carefully routinised paths. The very way we experience the space of the city, for the Situationists, resembled the logic of labour and capitalist production. They argued that, instead, cities should be designed around their ‘psychogeographic flows’: the natural contours and ‘emotional effects’ that the urban landscape produces (Ford, 2005: 34). Rather than following the predictable paths laid out for us by city planners and architects, we should let ourselves be directed by the city’s currents, flows, and fissures (see Debord, 2006a, b).


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For the SI, this meant engaging in play. Play, as Quentin Stevens (2007) argues, is opposed to the idea of function. Play is irrational, unpredictable; it is about breaking rules, defying conventions, and mixing with others in ways that are unexpected and unfamiliar. At the same time, though, games rely on rules to provide play with a generic structure and set of goals (Huizinga, 1970). In this chapter, I address this contestation over the term ‘play’ in the context of locative gaming. For the SI, play had its own revolutionary social goals: it was a means of radical resistance, aimed at ‘changing the society and life in which we find ourselves confined’ (Debord, 2006b: 25). Although many locative games draw on the SI’s philosophy of play, they are nonetheless dependent on broader economic and political conditions which constrain their actions in public space. They take place in contemporary cities where digitisation has opened up new opportunities for social engagement, but simultaneously created even more pervasive mechanisms for control and ‘networked intelligence’ (McQuire, 2008; Mitchell, 2003). The networks and devices used for locative gaming are themselves also subject to regulations. This leads me to suggest that locative games must move beyond the generic uses of these networks, and instead create their own self-organised forms of play within these various constraints.

Regulating the City: Boundaries, Networks, and Power All public play is determined by the rules, regulations, and conditions of the social space in which it is enacted. They shape and limit our playful practices in public space, whether they do so consciously through physical boundaries; or the forms of ‘ideological’ control enforced through institutions such as the legal system, the police, or social norms that constantly constrain our behaviour on an ‘unconscious’ level (Althusser, 1994). These conditions, as Stevens contends, manifest themselves in many ways that are unique to the urban experience: Play is shaped by urban social conditions: the density and diversity of people, the mixing of their activities, the unpredictability of their behaviour, their differing expectations, and the unfamiliarity of their expressions all contribute to instability and “the dissolution of constraints”...The diversity, anonymity and unfamiliarity of other persons encountered in the city lend public play a distinctive character (2007: 46-7).

Since locative gaming is located simultaneously in both real and networked space, it too becomes enmeshed in the social conditions of the urban environment, and its unique demographics, habits, customs, and the cultural beliefs and attitudes of its inhabitants. Unlike


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videogames, where the rules that shape gameplay are inscribed in their algorithmic code (Galloway, 2006; Wark, 2007), locative games are determined by the specific characteristics of public spaces in addition to the rules (both algorithmic and non-algorithmic) of the game. These spaces contain their own rules and regulations that are external to the game, whose rules are fixed, temporary, and make up the structure of the game universe. Game rules constrain play in certain ways, but they also make play possible—they give it shape and structure, providing a common set of rules for its participants (Huizinga, 1970). In contrast, the rules of social space are discontinuous, constantly changing, and—crucially—negotiable. They confront locative gamers with concrete structures and behavioural norms that consciously and unconsciously constrain their actions. However, as Lawrence Lessig notes, the constraints of the real world can clash, contradict one another, or be altered as the law, marketplace, physical architecture, and our ideas of acceptable behaviour change (2006: 126). This means that they are enforced not through an abstract set of rules, but real regulations imposed on individuals through constantly changing mechanisms of control. In urban space, these regulations manifest themselves in incredibly complex and often overt ways. The global city has become one of the most regulated spaces in contemporary society, due in large part to the digital networks that pervade its physical architecture. As Kluitenberg (2006) argues, networked space is being increasingly integrated into the physical environment as ‘miniaturisation’ and ever cheaper production costs make it easier to embed microcomputer technology carrying ‘specialised functions’ into physical locations where they can be controlled from centralised networks. CCTV cameras, tollway scanners, RFID smart tags, mobile phones and PDAs are now ubiquitous in many cities, and can be ‘activated’ by their users at any time for particular purposes—to check our toll registration, register items we want to buy, or locate missing pets (Kluitenberg, 2006: 13; see also Hawk and Rieder, 2008). But these technologies are not ‘neutral’: they can equally be appropriated by governments and corporations for surveillance, regulation, or simply to create a profile of their users. The existence of these technologies is therefore ambiguous, because although they give a much greater degree of control to users over their homes or property, paradoxically they also have the potential to enforce the strictest forms of regulation by authorities ever conceived—a theme that many recent science fiction films have explored.4 Gilles Deleuze (1992) provides a particularly dystopic reading of this possibility in his essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’. According to Delezue, ‘the individual never ceases


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passing from one enclosed place to another, each with its own laws’ (1992: 3). Each of these enclosed spaces—schools, banks, sports stadiums, our home—have their own specific, temporary ‘logics’ that apply only inside that space. These rules are enforced by the ‘mechanisms’ which govern those spaces—teachers, umpires, the family. According to Deleuze, however, digital information is replacing these specific mechanisms with generic ‘modules’ that now pervade every aspect of society (1992: 5-6). Deleuze’s argument in many ways parallels the rapidly changing strategies of control in cities: as technologies used for surveillance and regulation move into networked space, their reach extends beyond the particular space where they are located, and expands to cover entire cities. As McQuire writes: ‘Urban CCTV systems are no longer “islands” located at specific sites such as banks or casinos, but merge into networks permeating wide swathes of urban space. Anyone travelling through a contemporary city is likely to leave a traceable record’ (2008: 142). These networks of control have a significant impact on the way locative games are performed in public space. They create and impose additional rules or ‘boundaries’ that constrain the behaviour of players, who must then create tactics and counter-strategies to navigate these boundaries. As Stevens argues, though, boundaries are not always hegemonic or completely opposed to the activity of play: although they ‘differentiate’ space and limit what we can do and where we can go, they also provide concrete sites where people can play outside the normal rules of everyday space (2007: 114). In the process, they invite opportunities for resistance and opposition to the limits they proscribe. In fact, many locative projects rely on the existence of boundaries and social norms to create tactics aimed at challenging or overcoming them as part of their performance. The pro-privacy group ‘the Surveillance Camera Players’, for instance, demonstrate against the use of CCTV cameras by acting out scripted scenes from George Orwell’s (2003) dystopian novel Nineteen-Eighty Four in front of cameras located throughout New York.5 Play can thus be a way of establishing ‘altered or transformed understandings of place and place-making’ by confronting or challenging the way these places are constructed by authorities (Wilken, 2005: n.p.). Two locative games in particular, Sonic City (FAL, 2003-4) and Asphalt Games (Chang and Goodman, 2004), demonstrate this by incorporating the physical and social boundaries of cities as part of their gameplay. In Sonic City, players wear gear connected to a computer network, consisting of a microphone that records the sounds of the city—traffic, pedestrians, the bustle of the street—and translates it into musical rhythms that are played back into the


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user’s headphones as they are walking (Figure 1). It transforms local places into a ‘musical interface’, forcing players to change direction to produce different sounds, avoid heavily concentrated areas, and adapt and respond to certain situations in order to gain control over the musical experience (Gaye and Holmquist, 2006). Similarly, in Asphalt Games, participants play off against each other by performing ‘stunts’ which must satisfy various themes or phrases by incorporating them into a public performance in New York’s streets. These performances are then judged by their peers on the game’s website, enabling them to conquer territory and turf from other players (Figure 2). Asphalt Games confronts players with social and psychological boundaries as well as physical ones: ‘playing invented games on street corners—and then uploading documentation to the internet—can be socially uncomfortable or even dangerous, especially for people who may not identify themselves as risk-takers’ (Chang and Goodman, 2006: n.p.). Although some players had to overcome their fear or embarrassment over playing publicly, it also created opportunities for them to test each other and score points by taking advantage of their peers’ awkwardness. In one instance, a player who ‘cheated’ by performing a stunt on his rooftop was beaten by a challenger who used the same elements to stage her own, more elaborate version in front of bystanders. In both these games, then, the rules of physical space become integral elements in the gameplay, providing concrete places where broader social struggles are acted out through performative play.

Figures 1-2: Left, the Sonic City prototype worn by a player in Goteborg; Right, the Asphalt Games website where participants rate the performances of challengers. Images are the property of the games’ respective creators.


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Strategies and Tactics in the Creative City For de Certeau, walking in the city creates a rhythm or ‘rhetorical’ style for expressing everyday experiences. The ‘language’ of everyday life is directly opposed to the public discourse employed by urban planners, architects, and government institutions, which is aimed at ‘conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties’ (1984: 94). The space of the city is organised by the ‘strategies’ of these authorities, and are present everywhere a ‘subject with a will and power’ can be identified: governments, corporations, and political institutions. These strategies manage the social relations within the places of the city. For de Certeau, public space is therefore the ‘space of the other’: individuals must employ tactics which ‘play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organised by the law of a foreign power’ (1984: 35-7). De Certeau’s utopian concept of the social uses of public space has been influential as a way of conceiving power relations amongst individuals and authorities in cities, and offers a useful analogy for the way locative games navigate public space. Locative games similarly employ rhetorical tactics which challenge the boundaries within those spaces that are designed to control or regulate our behaviour. As in a rhetorical performance, they use the ‘available means’ of play to accomplish the goals of the game, and to overcome the social and physical barriers which constrain their players’ actions. The gameplay takes place within the ‘terrain’ of the other, regulated by local laws, social norms, and the physical design of the city which is aimed at producing particular patterns of behaviour and navigation (Debord, 2006a, b; Sadler, 1998). As Eric Klopfer (2007) observes, even in projects where the gameplay occurs in a virtual replica of the city, it does so from the viewpoint of its citizens, rather than planners and architects, enabling them to examine it from multiple angles where previously they have only witnessed it from the perspective of their local suburb or region. In PlastiCity (Fuchs, 2004-6), for instance, participants could rebuild their city from the ground up, moving fluidly from the birds-eye perspective of city planners down to the micro-level details of a particular building, street, or corner; they could then deliberate and participate in the future design of their city. As Klopfer writes: The connection between the physical and virtual spaces furthers the sense of authenticity on the part of players, allowing them to see themselves as active participants in the game. They can


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influence the course of events and also be influenced by them, and thus feel as though their participation matters. Feeling a connection between the game and themselves enables players to develop much deeper understandings of the context in which the game is played (2007: 382).

Although this distinction between the ‘strategic’ and ‘tactical’ usefully describes the practices of some locative games, I would argue that a more complex understanding of the potential for these games to intervene in public space is necessary in light of the changing role of contemporary cities in the global economy. Locative games, as I have argued throughout this thesis, are the outcome of a vast restructuring of power made possible by the rollout of digital networks in cities across the world. This means that they are dependent on these networks, which are not simply able to be accessed at any time, but are subject to their own forms of regulation inscribed into their digital architecture or ‘code’ (see Diebert, et al., 2008; Lessig, 2006, 2004; Mosco, 2004; Wark, 2004). Code, as Lessig (2006) observes, is the law which regulates cyberspace, and can be ‘built’ or designed to regulate its users’ behaviour. In addition, as Galloway and Ward point out, locative games are subject to the ‘availability of particular material devices...as well as to the private and public policies and laws regulating their use’ (2005: 4). More broadly, locative games are being performed in cities which have become hives for innovation and creativity, and where, as Sean Cubitt (2001: 133) observes, the distinction between work and play is gradually disappearing. The rise of ‘creative cities’ means that cities now attract highly mobile ‘knowledge workers’ to their spaces as a way of cementing their position in the global economy, invigorating their public culture through the by-products of this creativity, and competing for the populations of other global cities (Florida, 2005a). The potential for ‘play’ to run counter to the strategies of these cities is therefore problematised when playful practices are in fact encouraged by their economic imperatives (see Bauwens, 2005 and Terranova, 2004, 2003 for a more detailed discussion). Indeed, a number of locative games are in fact created and run by companies who generate revenue through user participation, such as Perplex City (Mind Candy, 2005); while others are tied into commercial films or games, like I Love Bees (42 Entertainment, 2004), which was used to promote the videogame Halo 2 (Bungie Software, 2004). While these commercial locative games have the potential to include a much greater number of people and to gain mainstream status, the shift into the mainstream greatly reduces their ability to actively intervene in public space. Instead, they threaten to be passively absorbed into the practices of the creative


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city, producing forms of interactivity that are naturalised, commonplace, and aimed at generating revenue rather than privileging the relationship between their users and the social spaces in which they take place. For this reason, I would argue it is necessary for locative games to develop a model for play which is not dependent on already existing networks and platforms, but instead create their own collaborative, self-organised models from which they can intervene in the social space of cities and foster participation from their citizens. In the next chapter, I take up this argument further and suggest that if locative games are to overcome these limitations, they must actively reshape the urban landscape by creating public performances which rely on unexpected interactions from their participants and create evolving social relationships that become part of the cultural milieu of these cities.


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Chapter Three Net Culture/Locative Culture: Beyond the Ludic City All play has its rules. They determine what “holds” in the temporary world circumscribed by play. The rules of a game are absolutely binding...as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play–world collapses. The game is over. -- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1970: 11)

Constant’s New Babylon was the ultimate expression of the ludic city. Constant Nieuwenhuys, a lapsed Situationist, despaired at the ‘sterile’ ambience of modern cities whose ‘impoverished expression of bourgeois contentment’ was reflected in their functional architecture, their leisure centres, and the streets devoid of direct social relations and ‘collective activities’ (2006: 71). Repelled by these ideas, Constant drew up the plans for a futuristic city he called ‘New Babylon’, a city built for the social needs of its inhabitants whose extraordinary complexity and vastness was rivalled only by its technological utopianism. New Babylon was a fractured, multilayered space consisting of multiple tiers elevated above the ground, eliminating buildings and roads altogether in favour of a ‘continuous’, multidimensional structure divided into ‘clusters’ for living and public gathering (2006: 72). Instead of replacing technology with nature, New Babylon incorporated it as a means for controlling the city and reshaping it according to its inhabitants’ desires: they could modify its climate, ambience, lights and sounds, as they saw fit. New Babylon reimagined the urban environment as a ludic city, a playspace whose architecture would perpetually manifest itself as ‘the natural expression of a collective creativity’ (2006: 71). For all its imagination, New Babylon’s utopianism and naiveté has largely been confirmed as new technologies have not only diminished the ability for citizens to redesign everyday social space en masse, but arguably contributed to an even more widespread rejection of public life (Sennett, 2002; Virilio, 1994). Indeed, upon being expelled from the SI, Constant’s vision of New Babylon later resurfaced, distorted into a horrific, dystopian nightmare (Ford, 2005: 76).


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It is clear that the ludic city will likely never be realised. In locative gaming, however, we are seeing the potential for networked media to reshape certain locales in the city into dynamically changing arenas for interaction, creativity, and play. But to accomplish this, locative games must do more than simply extend play into public space; they must blend it with the social and cultural milieu of these places, encouraging participation and building social relations amongst their inhabitants. In this chapter, I approach locative games from this perspective, dividing my discussion between two locative games—Project Blinkenlights and Mogi—which achieve these goals in differing ways. In previous chapters, I argued locative games must incorporate the unique characteristics of the physical environment into their gameplay. This chapter takes my argument further, arguing that developing social relations ‘on the fly’ is the fundamental challenge of locative games which aim to evolve, adapt, and remould themselves to correspond with the public life of the cities in which they are performed.

Project Blinkenlights as Interaction, Participation and Public Interface Thirty years ago, the sociologist Richard Sennett declared that ‘electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end’ (2002: 282). For Sennett, the arrival of the television set in homes in the post-world war II period was synonymous with the gradual disappearance or decline of the ‘public’ from Western culture throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Electronic media such as television and radio are inherently ‘intimate objects’, according to Sennett, confining users to the private realm of their home at the expense of public activities in the broader community. Engagement with public life became ‘a matter of observation’, ‘passive participation’, and ‘voyeurism’ as the sites of public interaction become less the dynamic agora for democratic deliberation envisioned by Habermas (1989), and increasingly a stage for celebrities, performers, and political figures (Sennett, 2002: 27; see also Harvey, 2001; Virilio, 1994). It comes as no surprise, then, that the advent of mobile media was celebrated by many theorists (Mitchell, 2003, Rheingold, 2002) for signalling the emancipation of media from the confines of the lounge or bedroom, and its entrance into the public domain. Mobile media quickly colonised the public spaces of cities, occupying bored train passengers, connecting individuals from disparate locations, and keeping us constantly connected to the internet and our email and itineraries. People with access to these devices became more connected and


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electronically mobile than ever, carrying with them an abundance of information and entertainment. Yet, as Mizuko Ito observes, the appeal of portable media is often the ‘snug and intimate technosocial tethering’ they provide (2005: 1). Our ability to customise and personalise them to reflect our individual personalities suggests they actually occupy an intimate place in our lives: they reveal as much about our personality and how we present ourselves as our choice of clothing or hairstyle. They might be seemingly everywhere in public space, but mobile gadgets are intensely private possessions, as privileged as a diary or a beloved accessory. For this reason, Kluitenberg (2008) claims that the entrance of mobile technologies into the public arena does not necessarily promote active engagement with those sites. Instead, they often further isolate their users from the environment and people around them: mobile phone conversations take place between two people, excluding others around them; MP3 players filter out the noise of the city; portable game consoles, even when linked for multiplayer gameplay, only allow participation from those in possession of the devices. As Kluitenberg writes: ‘mobile media entrench many people in a form of electronic autism, locked in singular concentration to their portable devices while they move through public space, visible and plugged-in, but entirely disconnected from the environment’ (2008: 205). In place of the everyday physical environment there now exists a persistent, ‘always on’ virtual world in the palm of one’s hand: as an individual navigates the streets, she is simultaneously navigating the contents of her MP3 library, or the gamespace of Tetris. Ironically, the entrance of mobile media into public space threatens to sever the final connection between individuals and the public realm, by excluding those few remaining public sites—public squares, parks, trains and trams, the street—from active social engagement. The pervasiveness of networked media in contemporary cities thus confronts locative projects with a crucial dilemma: how to ‘break the isolation of the media sphere’, as Kluitenberg (2008: 207) puts it, and instead encourage their participants to challenge the boundaries of public space. This dilemma is especially pertinent for locative games, which enable play in the public realm, but often do so in ways that are contained, introverted, and relevant only to their players without particularly involving or challenging the people around them. This is arguably the case for PacManhattan (Lantz et al., 2004), a locative game designed by a group of students where participants become players in a real-life version of the arcade classic PacMan (Namco, 1980) on New York’s streets. One person plays Pac-Man, who must navigate


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the streets collecting virtual ‘dots’ scattered around the game’s map, while four players act as the ‘ghosts’ who try to locate and tag him before he acquires them all. For each player there is a ‘controller’ who, via WiFi communication and a mobile phone, informs players of their location on the game map from a central control room. As its name suggests, PacManhattan merges the crowded streets of a city renowned for its fast-paced lifestyle with a pastiche of the Pac-Man gamespace. But by modelling itself on Pac-Man’s generic rules, it largely confines itself to a public re-enactment of the game. Participation is restricted: there are ten participants, only five of whom are physically located in the streets. Passersby who witness the game being played may admire its innovativeness (assuming they recognise the Pac-Man character), but cannot actively participate. As such, PacManhattan in fact absorbs the public space into the game universe: it remains the board on which the game is played, relevant only to its participants. Its potential to disrupt our use of these spaces is therefore limited: it only temporarily confuses or amuses passers-by in the same way ‘flash mobs’ confound people in the street rather than truly disrupts them. PacManhattan is what Jane McGonigal terms a ‘pervasive game’, extending the elements of gameplay into public space by appropriating that space for its own purposes (2007: 233). Like many other goal-oriented games such as BotFighters and GunSlingers, where the emphasis is on ‘killing’ opponents and scoring points, it is concerned with acting out an established formula determined by the game’s rules. The word ‘pervasive’ literally means to penetrate, to ‘spread through’ the city—these games extend play into social space, but the physical environment exists only to the extent that it serves the game’s goals. In order to overcome this, Kluitenberg (2008) and McQuire (2008) both suggest that participation and the fostering of social relations are vital to locative media projects. McQuire cautions against the tendency to assume that the pervasiveness of networked media in cities automatically lays the groundwork for public intervention. Instead, he writes, ‘in order to transform public space, a deeper critique of the public uses of new media is necessary...not as the belated response to an already existing social world, but as an integral part of the construction of social relationships’ (2008: 149). If locative games are to move beyond isolated, exclusionary performances, then, they must invite participation by incorporating the people occupying these public places into their gameplay. One way of achieving this, as Project Blinkenlights (2001-2) demonstrates, is to create a public spectacle within social space that privileges participation, collaboration, and interaction over the pre-established


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rules of the game. Blinkenlights, a large-scale installation created by the German hacker organisation Chaos Computer Club, first appeared on the Haus des Lehrers (House of Teachers) building at a public square in Berlin. It transformed that building into a giant computer screen, using the lights in 144 rooms (controlled via a switchboard) as ‘pixels’ to create simple animations and play ‘movies’. Participants and passers-by could then submit their own animations via their mobile phone which were displayed on the ‘screen’. Later, on the installation located at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, participants could use their mobile phones to play arcade games on the building’s facade, which was set up for a higher resolution display of 520 usable pixels (windows). Among the games playable were Pong, Tetris and Pac-Man (see Figures 3-4).

Figure 3: Project Blinkenlights participants play PacMan on Tower T2 of the Bibliotheque National de France, Paris. Source: http://blinkenlights.de/arcade.


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Figure 4: Blinkenlights version of Tetris at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Source: http://blinkenlights.de.

Blinkenlights has much in common with the installation SPOTS (realities: united, 2005), which projected ‘luminous images’ onto the facade of the Potsdamer Platz 10 building; and the ‘relational architecture’ experiments by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, in particular his 2004 installation of Vectorial Elevation in Dublin. Vectorial Elevation allowed participants to design ‘light sculptures’ on the internet, which were then projected into the city’s skyline using 22 computer-controlled searchlights. They were visible in the city from a distance of 15 kilometres, and changed every 14 seconds; all the designs were photographed and archived on the project’s website. As McQuire contends, the installation was notable particularly for its democratisation through the internet: ‘Instead of a spectacle mysteriously controlled from above, the work utilised the decentralised capacity of the internet to offer participants the ability to intervene, even temporarily, in a public space of great scale’ (2008: 152). Blinkenlights similarly creates a highly visible public spectacle which—although not as immersive or elaborately designed as projects like PacManhattan or GunSlingers— nonetheless establishes a ‘public interface’ through which citizens of cities like Paris and Berlin could contribute their own designs, or compete in large-scale versions of Pac-Man and Tetris. Networked media—mobile phones, the internet—in this case invite participation from people outside the project’s original creators. As a result, the project is much more likely to attract the people who live in these global cities, since it potentially includes everyone around the local site in the gameplay through a public interface visibly integrated into the social landscape of their city.


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Mogi, Mastery, and the Social Mobile Game Blinkenlights offers one way of attracting participants by staging a prominent spectacle within public space which acts as an interface for democratic participation. However, because of the time, effort, and cost involved in setting up a large-scale installation like Blinkenlights, it is unlikely to sustain an ongoing relationship amongst its participants. In order to create shared relations among players, locative games will likely need to create a more complex formula for integrating their gameplay into the everyday lives, habits, and customs of their participants. Mogi, Item Hunt is a treasure hunt game located in Tokyo whose players use their mobile phones to collect virtual items scattered around the city. They are directed by other members of their team to the locations of these items (grouped into various collections of fruits, flowers, and creatures), who scan the city using the game’s website interface. The collector then uses a 3D map on their GPS-enabled mobile phone to pinpoint the items, and when they come within 400 metres of its virtual ‘tag’ add it to their team’s bounty (Figures 56). Players can also trade with other teams for items they need.

Figures 5-6: Left, the 3D Mogi game map as it appears on players’ mobile phones; Right, the Mogi website interface directing collectors through the city. Source: Wired.com (courtesy Paul Baron).


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There is a goal in Mogi. But in stark contrast to the temporary, self-contained goals of shootand-‘kill’ games like BotFighters, Mogi encourages players to invest time and effort into the game indefinitely: points are gradually accumulated over time, and depend on the cooperation of other players rather than direct competition. As one player, Paul Baron, puts it: ‘[those games] are about conquest and battles, and that's probably great fun, but how do you build a community when you have to kill the community?’ (quoted in Terdiman, 2004: n.p.). For Baron, the appeal of Mogi is the fact that players collaborate with each other, trading for the items they want and relying on team members to be in specific locations at the right time. It moulds itself around the whims and habits of its players, offering a casual pastime. Mogi, as with a growing number of locative games, extends play not only into physical space, but into the communities that make up that space. By encouraging players to work together to complete tasks that are beneficial to both themselves and each other, Mogi provides a degree of ‘mastery’ to their participants. Mastery, as Daniel Roy observes, is a common trait of many videogames, and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games in particular, whereby players achieve personal relevancy and a sense of achievement by accomplishing tasks that can be visibly measured by them and their peers (2007: 12-5). By offering players tangible rewards, locative games can potentially foster a sense of collaboration and community-building that becomes integral to the gameplay. In Insectopia (Peitz, 2006), for instance, players collect items (insects) using a bluetooth-enabled device. Although players can venture out on their own to build up their collection, Insectopia makes it is easier and more efficient for players to team up: when a player is by herself, she can only catch an insect every three minutes, but joining with another player allows them to catch every insect they find and split the catch between them. Locative games like Insectopia and Mogi, I would argue, are more likely to attract a wider audience of players than GunSlingers and PacManhattan, which appeal mostly to a ‘hardcore’, techsavvy group of players interested in immersing themselves in an immediate setting to achieve the goals of the fictional game world. These games tend to exclude players who don’t have the time, resources, or interest to devote themselves to intensive gameplay sessions; and without constant revision of their players’ needs, they may fail to develop over time and evolve beyond the generic formula they began with. Locative games must therefore constantly adapt to their players’ needs and conditions, while sustaining their interest by providing a sense of mastery or accomplishment through the


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gameplay, if they are to last longer than simply one or two performances. This involves creating a gameplay structure that is not overly rigid or constrained by the rules, but which constantly evolves to reflect the conditions of the local sites in which they are performed. Although these material conditions shape and limit the actions of their participants, they also provide opportunities for locative games to mould themselves around the unique social and cultural dimensions of the city. Mogi is located in Tokyo city, meaning the specific physical and cultural characteristics of that environment will determine how the game is constructed and how its goals are accomplished. The geographical layout of Tokyo, its highly integrated public transport lines and its dense, clustered urban population, make a game like Mogi well suited to its terrain because it relies on the proximity of players and their ability to quickly scour highly populated areas for items. In comparison, Mogi would be significantly less successful if it were located in the highly congested, vehicle-laden freeways of Melbourne or Sydney; or the decentralised, sprawling urban cities of the United States (Terdiman, 2004). Mogi’s gameplay therefore closely resembles the unique physical characteristics of the city in which it is located, structuring the tactics of its players around them. This is not to claim, though, that social mobile games like Mogi or Insectopia are static, remaining confined to a single archetype. Like any ‘product’ in the global era, locative games can be adapted and redesigned to suit the local contexts of other cities by changing their rules and structure. I began this essay by suggesting that locative gaming came into existence at the height of globalisation, emerging from the massive restructuring of power relations at the micro level of cities as global networks embed themselves in local sites. While globalisation has made locative gaming possible, its influence does not end there: this interconnectivity means that locative games can potentially be transported across different nations and cultures in accordance with wider economic structures. As both Terry Flew (2007) and Arjun Appadurai (1996) argue, as global media products flow across borders and boundaries, they do not latently settle into their populations but attach themselves to their local contexts, undergoing a process of adaptation, integration, and localisation. As Flew observes, this is a complex process which occurs when ‘cultural forms derived from one place are forced to make contact with the diverse formations of identity, culture and practice [from] elsewhere’ (2007: 163; see also Sassen, 2006a). While Mogi’s current structure would likely be untenable in the US or Australia, the generic model of the social mobile game itself can be extended to other locales by altering its rules to reflect the specific material conditions of those places. Globalisation therefore not only makes locative gaming possible, but ensures


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they remain dynamically changing as they move beyond their local context and into different cities and cultures, each with their own individual geography, demographics, and cultures. If locative games are to take advantage of this close relationship with the public culture of contemporary cities, then, their creators will need to make the development of social relations their fundamental aim. Blinkenlights and Mogi demonstrate vastly different ways of accomplishing this, either by creating a public interface which catches the attention of citizens who become participants in a spectacle that temporarily alters the cityscape; or by nurturing a collaborative environment where they work together to achieve goals that have personal and social relevance. These games exploit the intersection between real and networked space in these cities to actively intervene in the public interactions that take place amongst their inhabitants. As such, they demonstrate the potential for locative games to become more than self-enclosed performances, and instead foster unexpected outcomes and relationships that are more likely to encourage a renewed engagement with public life.


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Conclusion In Knowbotic Research’s exhibition Naked Bandit (2008), participants step into a vast tent filled with floating shiny black balloons, accompanied by a silver zeppelin which hovers ominously through the air, scanning its inhabitants through a camera lens. It emits a soft whirring sound as it ducks and dives amongst participants, constantly provoking them to confront its presence. In the background, authoritative voices utter the phrase ‘naked bandit’ and ‘here, not here’; a reference to the rendition of suspects in extra-legal camps like Guantanamo Bay. Naked Bandit creates an ambiguous space where participants are forced to react to the various opportunities and confrontations posed by its mysterious objects. Like many of the locative games I have discussed, it creates a gamespace where specific rules, physical architecture and social norms constrain its participants’ actions, but in a way that creates often unexpected reactions and interactions that could only take place within these dynamic, playful encounters. In this thesis, I have investigated the potential for locative games to bring this unique rhetoric of play to the public spaces of the contemporary city. I began by laying out the material conditions which have made locative gaming possible, including the convergence of physical and networked space as local places become enmeshed in global networks; and the splintering of the city into multiple zones, enabling citizens to intervene in the social and political formations that govern public space. I then argued that whether or not locative games have a political goal in mind, they are inextricably caught up in these struggles, as well as the broader regulations which, now more than ever, pervade the physical architecture of the city. If locative games are going to break from these forms of control and resist becoming simply a commonplace feature of the emerging ‘creative city’, they will need to evolve beyond their generic formula and attach themselves to the unique local cultures, behaviours, and social relations of their inhabitants. The final chapter suggested ways of achieving this by looking at a number of locative games that privilege public engagement over self-enclosed models of gameplay. The aim of this thesis has not been to organise locative games into different genres, or to account for each individual manifestation of these projects. This would be unfeasible, since,


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as I have argued, locative games are not static and unchanging, but like the vast transformations we are witnessing in cities today, they are constantly shaped by the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions and upheavals in which they are inescapably entangled. I have, however, attempted to chronicle the macro-level conditions that are common to all these projects, while exploring the many ways they create new forms of interaction and participation at the micro level. For me, this means recognising that they are subject to elements that are external to their rules and goals, but also considering ways they can and have incorporated these elements as an integral part of their gameplay. Like Naked Bandit, locative games will need to establish clear rules to create an environment for play, but at the same time challenge their players to confront these rules and engage in behaviour that is unpredictable and which encourages the formation of social relationships and public engagement. This, I believe, will be the future challenge for locative gaming if it is to continue to adapt and evolve in accordance with the changing conditions of the global city.

WORD COUNT = 11, 875


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Endnotes: 1

Other terms include ‘pervasive gaming’ and ‘ubiquitous gaming’ (see McGonigal, 2007; Thomas, 2006; Walther, 2006 for definitions). I avoid these terms, however, since they tend to suggest the colonisation of public space by networked gameplay, which as I argue throughout this essay is only one form these games can take, and one which often overlooks the importance and specificity of those spaces to the actual gameplay experience. 2

As Marvin and Parry (2005) demonstrate in their essay on the ‘UK fuel crisis’, this local embeddedness means that networks can never be taken for granted, since they can easily be brought down by events such as power outages, natural disasters, or sabotage by activists or terrorist organisations which take place at the local level. The 2007 sub-prime mortgage crises in the United States and subsequent global financial meltdown in 2008 also illustrate the potential for conditions that begin in local economies to have a ‘domino effect’ that spreads through global markets. As such, the interconnectivity between local sites and global networks can equally have negative and destabilising consequences for each site connected to those networks. 3

Throughout this thesis, I refer to a number of locative media projects, some of them games and others artistic performances. From this point, whenever I mention a project for the first time, I will include in parentheses its year and creator. A full bibliography of these projects can be found in the ‘References’ section, under ‘Projects’ (p44). Here I list the project’s name, year, creator, the city (or cities) in which it was performed, and a link to its official website where possible. 4

Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), Enemy of the State (Tony Scott, 1998), Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), and A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) come to mind. 5

The Surveillance Camera Players’ website can be found at http://www.notbored.org/thescp.html. Although they are an activist organisation and not a locative project, their performances usefully highlight the potential for boundaries created by networked surveillance to inspire a Situationist-like resistance to control. Thanks to Scott McQuire for pointing out this example to me.

List of Figures: Figure 1.

The Sonic City Prototype

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Figure 2.

The Asphalt Games Web Page

22

Figure 3.

Blinkenlights Rendition of Pac-Man in Paris

30

Figure 4.

Blinkenlights Rendition of Tetris in Berlin

31

Figure 5.

The Mogi 3D Mobile Phone Map

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Figure 6.

The Mogi Website Interface

32


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Projects: Asphalt Games (2004) N/A Michele Chang & Elizabeth Goodman, New York BotFighters (2002) It’s Alive!, Sweden

N/A

GunSlingers (2002) Mikoishi, Singapore

www.guns.mikoishi.com

I Love Bees (2004) 42 Entertainment, United States

www.ilovebees.com

Insectopia (2006) Johan Peitz, Sweden

www.pervasive-gaming.org/iperg _games7.php

Mogi, Item Hunt (2003) Mathieu Castelli, Tokyo

www.mogimogi.com

Naked Bandit (2008) Knowbotic Research, Beijing (NAMOC)

www.mediartchina.org/hte/balloon

PacManhattan (2004) Frank Lantz & students, New York

www.pacmanhattan.com

Perplex City (2005) Mind Candy, London

www.perplexcity.com

PlastiCity (2004-6) Matthias Fuchs, Bradford (U.K.)

http://creativetechnology.salford.ac.uk/ fuchs/art/plasticity/

Project Blinkenlights (2001-2) Chaos Computer Club, Berlin; Paris

http://blinkenlights.de http://blinkenlights.de/arcade

Sonic City (2003-4) Future Applications Lab, Goteborg

http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/ soniccity/

SPOTS (2005) realities: united, Potsdam, Berlin

www.spots-berlin.de/en/index.php www.realities-united.de.

Vectorial Elevation (2004) Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Dublin

www4.alzado.net/edintro.html www.lozano-hemmer.com