Intergenerational Locative Play

Augmenting Family

Michael Saker, Leighton Evans

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839091414
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Intergenerational Locative Play: Augmenting Family examines the social, spatial and physical impact of the hybrid reality game (HRG) Pokémon Go on the relationship between parents and their children.
The ubiquity of digital media correlates with a mounting body of work that considers the part digital technologies, such as video games, play in the lives of children. Consequently, commentators have deliberated the effects of rising levels of screen time and the association of this trend with antisocial behaviour, mental health-related problems, and the interference of family life. Yet, recent studies have demonstrated that the intergenerational play of video games can in fact strengthen familial connections by facilitating communication between adults, and children, and allowing adolescents to experiment with a range of roles.
Research on intergeneration play, however, has tended to focus on video games played within the domestic sphere. In contrast, Locative games, such as Pokémon Go involve players physically interacting and moving through their surroundings. Through an original study of Pokémon Go this book extends developing research on intergenerational play to the field of locative games.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Locative Games and Intergenerational Play

This book explores how an assortment of families incorporate, integrate and utilise digital technologies on a daily basis, both within and outside of their homes. More precisely, it is a book that focuses on families who play locative games together: those games that are played in public spaces with the aid of smartphones and related applications. It considers the effect this practice might have on their mobilities, experiences of space and place and social relationships, alongside nested concerns about surveillance and the digital economy. It is, therefore, a book that examines the varied familial advantages, opportunities and threats that playing locative games might elicit for those families who do so. Importantly, it adopts the perspective of parents and the reflexive meanings they attribute to these locative interactions. To be clear, this book does not demonise digital technologies or condemn emergent forms of mobile media as eroding the sanctity of the public space. Similarly, the book does not make sweeping generalisations about the growing number of families that occupy the same physical space, while engaging in a range of digital activities explicitly disconnected from the physical setting. Instead, this book appreciates the effect of any given technology as being indicative of the assemblage within which it is configured (Latour, 2005). In other words, there is nothing intrinsic about any given media, however new or shiny it might appear, that guarantees a particular effect or outcome. Digital technologies, in this context, can lead to families spending quality time together, just as they can lead to families spending time apart.

Moving forward, then, the purpose of this introduction is to begin unpacking some of the central themes that this book engages with. First, the chapter will outline significant historical developments within the field of locative media, with questions concerning space and place dominating the agenda, and foreshadowing much of the literature surrounding locative games. Second, the chapter will examine the changing landscape of locative media from 2009 onwards and how these advancements eventually provided the necessary foundations for the next generation of locative games to emerge. Third, the chapter will provide an overview of the hybrid reality game (HRG), Pokémon Go, which exemplifies this next generation of pervasive play. At the same time, the chapter will consider the suitability of this game to intergenerational play, while underlining the need for research in this filed to move beyond traditional video games. Fourth, the chapter will introduce and describe the original research project that undergirds the various points, comments and observations made throughout this book. Finally, the chapter will outline an exegesis of the remainder of the book through a summary of the ensuing chapters.

1.1 Locative Media and the Centrality of Space and Place

During the early 2000s, discussions about mobile media were regularly marked by questions concerning location (Tuters & Varnelis, 2006), and for good reason. An array of digital artists and groups were frequently experimenting with the social and spatial possibilities of emergent locative media (Kabisch, 2010; Tanaka & Gemeinboeck, 2008; Wilken & Goggin, 2014), alongside their ability to ‘reframe the relationship between people and spaces’ (de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014, p. 3). Blast Theory is a key example of this trend, creating one of the first location-based games in their early work, Can You See Me Now (2001). In doing so, these experiments began to slowly normalise nascent locative assemblages.

At the same time, the mobile social network, Dodgeball, developed by Dennis Crowley in 2000, established that the affordances of mobile phones could create new forms of sociality in urban environments (Humphreys, 2007, 2010). Here, ‘[users] would post their location on Dodgeball's accompanying website and it would send out a series of SMS text messages to a defined list of friends’ (Evans & Saker, 2017, pp. 4–5); producing ad hoc social interactions based on physical proximity. While Dodgeball was eventually taken over by Google in 2005, before being shut down in 2009, it nonetheless served as an important primer for the locative possibilities of more technologically advanced handsets that were on the cusp of being released.

The advancement of mobile phones around 2007, following the release of the iPhone 3GS, from devices that permitted phone calls and SMS text messages to smartphones that incorporated myriad technologies, such as global positioning system (GPS), meant these handsets could be located in concrete space (Frith, 2018). This bringing together of the physical and digital aspects of the city (Licoppe, 2016) through the mobile web (Saker & Evans, 2016) effectively allowed information technology to move beyond the desktop and into everyday urban life (McCullough, 2006), leading to what de Souza e Silva (2006) seminally describes as ‘hybrid space’. As Frith (2018) explains, ‘[the] digital information people access in hybrid spaces is not exterior to the place; it becomes a part of that place for the user, just as a street sign or other physical informational becomes a part of a place’ (p. 24).

By 2010, then, locative media had notably shifted from something artistic, obscure and specialised to something commercial, commonplace and ubiquitous (Wilken, 2012). For Wilken and Goggin (2014), ‘[as] mobile phones developed into fully fledged media devices, various affordances led to new kinds of sociotechnical marshalling of location’ (Wilken & Goggin, 2014, p. 4). And this development can readily be observed with the advent and subsequent success of the location-based social network (LBSN), Foursquare.

Released in 2009, Foursquare permitted users to share their physical position with a defined group of ‘friends’ by manually ‘checking in’ at their current location. The affordances of this LBSN functioned in four broad ways. First, check-ins enabled users to coordinate social gatherings, as well as initiate unplanned social interactions à la Dodgeball – albeit in a more technologically advanced manner. Second, users were awarded points for their check-ins. Friends would, therefore, compete for the highest score at the end of the week. Likewise, users who had checked in to a site more than anyone else during a period of 60 days would become the ‘mayor’ of that venue. Mayorships often involved benefits that extended into the physical world, such as a free refill of coffee in participating coffee shops. Users could also receive a variety of badges if they checked in to a specified combination of locations. Third, users were able to leave reviews and ‘tips’ about the places that they frequented, which could be additionally furnished with images. Lastly, users' physical movements were archived by Foursquare, allowing this LBSN to function as an aide-mémoire (Saker & Evans, 2016).

From the time Foursquare was released, a substantial body of work has coalesced around the wider field of locative media (de Souza e Silva & Glover-Rijkse, 2020; Evans & Saker, 2017; Frith, 2018; Halegoua, 2020; Wilken, 2019). While explicit examples of locative media have changed, as we discuss later in the chapter, extant literature on earlier locative applications remains vital in signalling the kind of scholarly interests that foundationally support this field, and which continue to influence and direct related research on the next generation of locative games today (Evans & Saker, 2019; Saker & Evans, 2020). And while we do not intend on granularly unpacking the entirety of this work, as such an endeavour would surpass the scope of this chapter, it is still important to provide a more detailed overview of these interconnected areas of attention, as we will return to many of these themes in later chapters.

In the main, studies of locative media have typically considered the impact of this phenomenon on phenomenological understandings of space, place (Evans & Saker, 2017; Farman, 2016; Hamilton, 2009) and culture (Galloway & Ward, 2005; Speed, 2010) – and often from the perspective of everyday life (Hjorth, Pink, & Horst, 2018; Özkul, 2014; Saker & Evans, 2016). Research has shown that the embodied space of mobile media (Farman, 2013) can augment the urban environment (Townsend, 2008), craft new environmental experiences (Southern, 2012) and turn ordinary life ‘into a game’ (Frith, 2013). Likewise, location-based applications can reshape mobilities (de Lange, 2009; Lemos, 2010; McGarrigle, 2010), with pervasive play modifying the routes and pathways users take to traverse their surroundings (Saker & Evans, 2016), thus producing novel urban narratives (de Souza e Silva, 2013; Papangelis et al., 2017) and more personalised experiences of the municipal setting (Saker & Evans, 2020), which echo the Situationist's idea of the dérive (de Souza e Silva & Hjorth, 2009).

The digital sharing of one's location through locative media also implicates the social realm, as various studies readily corroborate (Frith, 2014; Sukto & de Souza e Silva, 2011). From this position, LBSNs can produce resourceful cultures predicated on mediated proximity (Licoppe & Inada, 2010), which facilitate serendipitous encounters (Saker & Evans, 2016), different approaches to coordinating communal interactions (Campbell & Kwak, 2011; Sutko & de Souza e Silva, 2011; Humphreys & Liao, 2013; Licoppe, 2013; Saker & Frith, 2018; Wilken, 2008) and distinctive ways of connecting with the local social situation (Frith & Saker, 2017), grounded on persistent forms co-presence (Licoppe, 2004; Ling & Horst, 2011; Rainie & Wellman, 2012) that can restructure the experience of concrete space (Campbell & Ling, 2009; Gordon, Baldwin-Philippi, & Balestra, 2013; Martin, 2014).

For other commentators, a critical aspect of locative media and its recursive archival functionality revolves around the political economy, which underpins LBSNs (Perng, Kitchin, & Evans, 2016), as well as recent HRGs like Pokémon Go. For these scholars, locative media raises pressing questions about the developing value of locative data (Evans, 2013) together with apprehensions over surveillance (Humphreys, 2011; Lemos, 2011; Santaella, 2011), and the extent to which related services have the potential to either create new forms of social control (Hemment, 2004), based on the digital reimagining of the panopticon (Zeffiro, 2006), or enact geoplaced tactics of resistance (Berry, 2008) that can disrupt top-down systems of command through collective action (Townsend, 2006).

In a similar vein, these assemblages have allowed new visual practices to emerge (Hjorth & Pink, 2014; Pink & Hjorth, 2012), as well as novel methods for getting users to reflect on the images they associate with their LBSN check-ins (Wilken & Humphreys, 2019). To this end, Hjorth & Pink's (2014) notion of the ‘digital wayfarer’ provides a helpful toolbox to comprehend the mobile media user who not only ambulates her environment following different pathways, but who does so while creating congruent visualities through the camera functionality of smartphones, signalling a shift from ‘networked visuality to emplaced visuality and sociality’ (Pink & Hjorth, 2012) that both shape, and are shaped by, ‘intimate cartographies of place’ (Hjorth, 2013).

To a lesser extent, locative media has been inspected from the viewpoint of identity construction (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2014) with the marking of one's whereabouts through LBSNs like Foursquare effectively empowering users to present their identity via the inscription of space (Saker, 2016). Consequently, territoriality has become a central concept in understanding LBSN usage (Papangelis et al., 2020), with locative applications allowing distinctive revealings of place to materialise (Evans, 2015; Saker, 2017). Equally, the documenting of mob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Locative Games and Intergenerational Play
• Chapter 2 Familial Locative Play: Spatial Practices and Mobilities
• Chapter 3 Familial Locative Play: Family Life
• Chapter 4 Familial Locative Play: Social Relationships and Communities
• Chapter 5 Familial Locative Play: Digital Economy and Surveillance Capitalism
• Chapter 6 Familial Locative Play: Looking to the Future
• Index