In 1991, American computer engineer Loren Carpenter conducted an experiment. He gathered hundreds of people inside a large shed with rows of seats facing a giant screen. Placed on each seat was a paddle painted red on one side and green on the other. Carpenter gave participants no instructions or directions about what to do. Eventually, they noticed that on the screen there were green and red dots, correlating to the colours on each side of their paddle. They began waving their paddles in the air. Soon, it became clear that the dots on the screen moved depending on which side of the paddle was held up.
At this point, Carpenter projected the computer game Pong (Atari Inc., 1972) onto the screen. Again, he provided no instructions to participants. As the ball began bouncing from one side of the screen to the other, participants soon realised that, in order to play the game, they must use their physical paddles to manipulate the virtual paddles in the game.
The game worked by dividing the audience into halves. Each side of the room controlled the paddle on their side of the screen by holding the physical paddle in the air. A sensor then detected the colour being displayed. If an audience member held the green side up to the sensor, the paddle on their side would move up. If they showed red, it would move down. But in order to move the paddle into the right position, they would need to cooperate to control the speed of their paddle’s movement. As Carpenter describes it,
When the game is being played and the ball is going back and forth […] some people are going to have to show red to keep [the paddle] from going all the way to the top. If everybody just showed green, it would slam up to the top and the ball would miss. So something happened in that group of people, where some decided to show green and some decided to show red to cause it to stop in the right place. And we had no idea what did that. (Quoted in Curtis, 2011: n.p.)
The purpose of the experiment was to explore how a disparate gathering of people, mostly unknown to one another, would work together to collectively play Pong without any prior guidance or instructions. As Carpenter explains, ‘they’re all acting as individuals, because each of them can decide what they’re going to do’. But connected through the networked technologies—the sensors linked to the game interface—‘there’s an order that emerges that gives them a kind of amebae-like effect, where they surge, and they play, [forming] a kind of subconscious consensus’ (quoted in Curtis, 2011: n.p.).
Through the construct of a playful situation—a designated space (the shed) with props (paddles) and a set of rules (Pong)—participants were encouraged to suspend their normal inhibitions and alternately cooperate and compete with one another. Meanwhile, their actions were augmented by the networked interface. It translated their physical movements—waving the paddles—into information on the game screen. This information fed back into a continuous, embodied, and collective response from participants. In the process, it supported an ad hoc community momentarily held together through an assemblage of networked infrastructure, bodies, and the logic of the game.
Carpenter’s experiment not only embodies particular utopian ideas about the bonding, community-building, and unifying potential of networked technologies that were ascendant during the late twentieth century (see Chun, 2006; Kücklich, 2009). It also makes a very powerful claim about the power of play and its ability to bring people together through distanced yet meaningful interaction. It does so by drawing on the intersection of networked technologies with the fundamental properties of play—a complex blend of freedom and constraint, predictable and spontaneous behaviour, and propinquity with, and detachment from, others. This synergy between networked technologies and collective play underpins the techno-utopian ideals of Carpenter’s experiment and his claims about its political and social potential.
A decade after Carpenter’s experiment, these ideals were re-invoked through the practice of location-based gaming. Location-based games similarly use networked digital technologies to experiment with strangers’ behaviour and interaction in shared public spaces through a game format. They also use a combination of ad hoc, readily available technologies, and specialised equipment to interweave and blend the physical environment and players’ actions in it with the virtual game world. And they require players to communicate, work together, and move about to complete the goals of the game.
As I outline in more detail in the next chapter, location-based games emerged in the early 2000s during a period of experimentation with location-aware technologies, digital storytelling, and interactive media art. Although they assume many varied forms, most scholars and commentators concur that they involve moving digital gaming out of the home and away from the television or computer screen and into the everyday, physical environment—usually an outdoor, public space.
Location-based games accomplish this by using a device or game interface that tracks their players’ location and actions in physical space, incorporating these into the game. This interface might consist of any configuration of location-aware technologies—smartphones, mobile devices, Global Positioning System (GPS) location trackers, or geotagged data on a web interface.1 In the process, the virtual space of the game intermingles with the physical environment, temporarily reconfiguring and repurposing it for playful behaviour.
Like Carpenter’s experiment, location-based games are replete with claims about the socially and politically transformative potential of networked technologies and collective, public play. Scholars, mainstream commentators, and designers of these games alike laud their capacity to ‘reclaim’ public space and connect strangers across the digital and physical realms. They contend that location-based games encourage their players to overcome social and geographical boundaries by competing or collaborating in a shared and embodied environment (see de Souza e Silva, 2006; Lantz, 2006; McGonigal, 2006). And they situate them within a long lineage of playful activities and avant-garde practices, from early folk games and parkour to the playful interventions of French avant-garde movement the Situationist International (S.I.) and Fluxus artists (see de Souza e Silva & Hjorth, 2009; Montola, 2012; Stenros & Montola, 2009).
Other scholars have pointedly critiqued such claims and comparisons. They argue that location-based games can just as easily encourage players to behave or interact with others inappropriately, intruding in or colonising the physical environments in which they are played (see Farman, 2012; Flanagan, 2009; Gazzard, 2011). These scholars emphasise the ethical implications of bringing the game interface—usually a mobile or handheld device—into everyday social spaces. They warn of the potential disjunctures and inequalities that might emerge between players and non-players and the physical and virtual realms they occupy. The game’s interface and players’ actions, they contend, risk effacing or overwriting the context and lived conditions of the everyday physical environment in which it is played.
Through these claims, location-based game designers and scholars rhetorically invoke the concept of play and its many multifaceted and deeply rooted connotations: disruption, detachment, spontaneity, subversion, and transgression. They harness these qualities in support of their particular argument about location-based gaming’s potential to encourage players to engage with—or disconnect from—the people and environment around them. This confluence of playful behaviour, public space, and mobile, networked technologies gives rise to extraordinarily powerful and often polemical statements about their impact on everyday space. Such statements exemplify how potent and contradictory the discourses around play itself are—and how readily they are marshalled in the rhetoric around digitisation and its impact on public space. These are not neutral, impassive claims about networked technologies, but—like Carpenter’s account of his Pong experiment—highly loaded pronouncements about their broader social implications.
Discourses of Location-Based Gaming
In this book, I unpack the discourse around location-based games and their imbrication in wider debates about the impact of digitisation and networked media technologies on the public realm. Location-based games have been subject to what I define as two overarching ‘discursive claims’ about their implications for the spaces in which they are played. Each of these discursive claims consist of a relatively neutral statement, which is mobilised by theorists and commentators to make a rhetorical argument about their impact on players’ experiences of the people and environment around them through the game. Both of these neutral statements and the respective rhetorical arguments that accompany them can be summarised as follows:
- 1.Location-based games establish a demarcated space for distanced and detached playful behaviour, allowing play...