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Locative media and cultures of mediated proximity:

The case of the Mogi game location-aware community1

Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada Département Economie, Gestion, Sciences Humaines, E.N.S.T

46 rue Barrault 75013 Paris, France christian.licoppe@enst.fr ; yoriko.inada@enst.fr

Final version of this draft was published as: Licoppe C,& Inada Y, (2010), "Locative

media and cultures of mediated proximity: the case of the Mogi game location-aware

community" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(4) 691 – 709

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of the interaction order in a unique non-experimental and

enduring location-aware community (i.e. the players of the Mogi game), and of the ways it is

particularly oriented towards location and proximity concerns. It shows how one of its

features is the public character of positional data, so that players routinely orient towards the

fact that their location might be remarked and commented at all times. Location awareness

also provides users with resources to recognize their mutual co-proximity when they happen

to be close but not co-present. We will discuss how such a situation generally projects an

encounter as a relevant future course of action, in this environment as well as in other

mediated settings. The management of mediated proximities appears to be a crucial feature of

the organization of encounters between players in the Mogi community and, as we argue, this

must also be the case in any kind of location-aware community which supports occasions for

recognizing co-proximity ‘at-a-distance’. We describe various practices which have been

evolved in the Mogi location-aware community to recognize and acknowledge co-proximity

at a distance, manage its consequences and even play at fabricating situations that have the

appearance of mediated proximity events. This set of practices has gradually evolved to form

a rich and peculiar ‘culture of proximity’. Beyond its apparent singularity the kinds of

concerns with location and proximity that such a culture addresses are very general and could

play a central part in our understanding of future uses of locative media.

1 This research was partly funded by a research contract with OrangeLabs. We would like to thank Valerie

Beaudouin, Dominique Cardon and Frederique Legrand for their support.

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Introduction

Many hopes for the future of advanced mobile services are pinned on ubiquitous computing

and locative media. In recent years one of the directions for the development of user-position-

sensitive mobile technologies has been oriented towards building location awareness by

providing groups of users with some kind of ‘living map’ showing their continuously

changing locations in real time. The common base of these technologies is a location-aware

graphic terminal, interfaces through which the participants can be placed together on an

electronic card in relation to their absolute and relative positions, and a text-messaging

system. Active Campus, a project of this kind, is designed to experiment with this technology

in the university environment (Griswold et al., 2003). Another context is that of mobile urban

games based on the mobility of players through a town, as in the ‘Can You see Me Now?’ and

‘Treasure’ projects (Benford et al., 2003; Barkhuus et al., 2005) in which a game environment

is created in an urban setting. To act or interact the players have to align their embodied

perceptions and experiences of space, location and motion with the kinds of ‘affordances’ for

space, location and motion which the system offers. The digital game space may also feature

information resources and virtual objects ‘placed’ there by the designers2. In the ‘Active

Campus’ experiment, users visiting a place can leave ‘e-graffiti’ to which equipped users have

access via their terminals.

Such systems are designed to ‘augment’ mobile behaviour and activities and provide location-

based resources as affordances for original forms of encounters in the ‘hybrid ecologies’ they

enable (Crabtree and Rodden, 2008). Location-aware technologies articulate space and place

in new ways (Dourish, 2006) and may favour the enactment of hybrid ‘territories’ as an

emergent feature of recurring practices (Licoppe and Inada, 2009a). Moreover, particularly

when the technology makes locations visible and available through digital mapping devices, it

reshapes our perceptions and expectations concerning the ways in which the entities

constituting our environment can act and appear to us here and now (Thrift, 2004). It supports

forms of interaction and encounters that weave together embodied and digital forms of

presence and proximity. Such encounters are highly sensitive to the social and institutional

practices of users (Barkhuus and Dourish, 2004). However, all these studies were based on

experimental games played only once or very few times by users and covering a limited urban

area. What they cannot account for is the way a fully-fledged moral order governing the

2 To act on them in the screen space, the equipped user has to be physically close to their ‘location’.

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organization of ‘hybrid’ encounters might emerge from living together in a location-aware

environment. This is because it takes time, months and even years for a collective culture to

emerge from multiple interactions in massive multiplayer online games (Steinkuehler, 2006).

The aim of our research is to break new grounds by studying one such case, probably the first

of its kind. We report here on the kind of practices which have evolved in the non-

experimental location-aware community formed by the players of the Mogi game whose

‘hybrid ecology’ covered the whole of Japan and in which players were able to live together

for several years. We will focus on the ways players orient with respect to the fact that their

locations are visible (under certain conditions) by several other players, and with respect to

occasions of mediated proximity, i.e. situations in which ego can ‘see’ she/he is close to alter,

knows that alter also knows she/he is close to ego, both know they know, etc. This gives rise

to two concerns: first, how are such occasions of mutual proximity beyond the domain of co-

presence to be acknowledged in various circumstances and second, what may the interactional

consequences of such mediated proximities be and how should they be managed? We will

show that such concerns are constant and salient preoccupations for the Mogi users and how

the management of location awareness and mediated proximity is central to the interaction

order that has developed among them.

We will try to show how the study of this singular culture of proximity raises some larger

issues which shed some light on an understudied aspect of the ‘mobility turn’, mobility being

understood here as being to movement what place is to space (Cresswell, 2006). In the

mobility turn, the focus of the research moves towards the study of mobility as a social

performance rather than motion as mere transport, i.e. a straightforward kind of instrumental

action (Sheller and Urry, 2005) and towards the importance of wayfaring over transportation

and of dwelling practices over ‘occupation’ of locations (Ingold, 2007). In this framework

there has been a growing interest in understanding the interplay between a) proximity,

mobility and encounters (Boden and Molotch, 1994; Urry, 2002), and b) proximity (or

distance) and sociality in social networks (Axhausen, 2007; Carrasco et al., 2008). However,

the actual procedures for the serendipitous engineering of encounters has been little studied,

though the current development of communication technologies provides an increasing

number of resources for members to recognize their spatial proximity at a distance, to

acknowledge it and make relevant a face to face encounter as a future course of action

(Licoppe, 2009 forthcoming). Through our extensive analysis of the way the Mogi players

treat such occasions, we will gain an understanding of why and how the introduction of

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locative media and location-awareness multiplies the number and shapes of the occasions for

members to recognize their co-proximity at a distance, and how this turns the management of

mediated proximities into a central feature of social life in their location-aware cultures.

However singular the ways in which Mogi players actually manage such occasions may

appear, we will show that they can be understood as addressing general issues with regard to

the articulation of location, mobility and sociality in the frame of an interactional machinery

which interweaves the recognition/acknowledgement of mutual proximity (outside of co-

presence) and the relevance of a face to face encounter, in a way which is both general and

sensitive to the details of the situation. The existence of this tendency to treat the mutual

recognition of proximity as indexing an emergent project to meet, or as a move to push

forward such a project makes the management of mediated proximity a strong concern for

members, and a highly consequential set of practices. Moreover we can hypothesize that

occasions of mediated proximity will be particularly significant for the members of a

networked society with a high degree of mutual connectivity and availability, and that the

development of locative media will drive it to a central position in many forms of

collaborative behaviour. The Mogi case can then be seen as a kind of ‘laboratory in the wild’

which allows empirical testing of the workings of mediated proximity-related concerns which

are observable elsewhere in many different guises. Moreover we treat it through an

interactionist framework which will be relevant for studying other emergent cultures of

proximity within different location-aware communities.

2. Mogi, the game and its players: location-awareness as an interactional resource

2.1 The game and its players

The Mogi game was developed by a team led by Mathieu Castelli in a French start-up

(Licoppe and Guillot, 2006). It was commercialized in Japan in 2003 by the operator KDDI

which closed down the game server in 2008. Interested users could subscribe for free on the

KDDI portal. Since the operator did not advertise the game, it appears from our interviews

that many players first came across the game while they were browsing the portal, which

happened to be at the time the company was offering a one month free trial on most games.

The players were attracted by features related to geo-location. If the players subscribed (and

most of them did then or later) to the flat rate unlimited package for mobile data which KDDI

commercialized at the same time, the additional cost for the game itself was low. Players

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considered that this kind of suscription allowed them to play as much as they wanted without

ever having to worry about cost.

The game scenario consists in collecting virtual objects with a mobile phone. These are

‘localized’ in the sense that players can act on them only when they are close to their virtual

position and are continuously created and renewed by the game designers. These items are

designed by the design team. Certain objects to be collected are very simple, for instance

precious stones spread across Japan. Others play on the players’ situation and context. Certain

objects are available only in some parts of the country, others are visible and accessible only

at certain times of the day. The design also included ‘active’ items: virtual ‘creatures’ that

were able to create, move or destroy nearby objects; chests, which players can ‘open’ in

certain conditions in the hope of winning a highly valuable object; or quests (additional points

could be earned by moving an object close to a given place). This diversity illustrates an

important property of context-aware services. Context-awareness concerns not only people or

terminals but also informational objects that can be ‘placed’ in the mobile user’s environment.

As the Mogi example shows, it is possible to enhance a mobile users’ environment almost

infinitely and to create rich and complex ecologies that could be called ‘augmented’ towns.

Between 2004 and 2007, at the time of our inquiry, the game had an average of about one

thousand regular players scattered all over Japan. User profiles were clearly very different to

those observed on the internet. There were almost as many female as male players. A large

proportion of players were in the 25-40 age group. Our interview study focused on five men

and five women within that age group. They were of widely diverse social origins ranging

from a bank manager to a packer and a sophisticated young mother to a saleslady in a

department store. Two of them had a slight disability and found that the sociability of the

game gave them a form of integration3 .

In the Mogi game, players are organized into teams (a resource added in 2004 which met with

immediate success) and can constitute a list of mutually ratified ‘mogi-friends’ in a way quite

analogous to the management of ‘buddy lists’ in instant messaging. Two very different types

of playing behaviour can be observed:

- ‘Determined collectors’ accumulate objects (sometimes ten times the same collection)

and interact with other players, especially to obtain the objects they are still missing.

3 For cultural and religious reasons, it seems that people with a disability find it very difficult to be socially

integrated in Japan.

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- ‘Social players’ are not particularly concerned with accumulating objects, though they

still gather them and trade them. For them, the main objective is to meet other players

and to communicate with them. They are particularly attentive to forms of politeness

that develop in player communities and to the proprieties that onscreen encounters

have to respect.

Since we are interested here in the way location awareness can mediate original forms of

sociality and interactions, we will mostly examine the socially oriented behaviour of players.

Regarding more specifically the topic of encounters, most players do not know one another

beforehand and subscribe independently to the game. They tend to avoid meeting face to face

and to elude such proposals systematically when coming from unknown players. Similarly,

they also rarely exchange their mobile email addresses, such that most of their text messages

are sent and received on the game-dedicated text messaging system. Therefore, the social

interactions that are elicited in the course of playing the Mogi game are mostly kept within the

game’s technical infrastructure. This apparent shyness may be a characteristic feature of

inhabiting a location-aware world with strangers.

2.2. Research methods

We had access to the anonymous corpus of text messages exchanged by the players (Licoppe

and Inada, 2006). We were also able to interview a dozen players, some of them several

times. The kind of immersion that such a corpus of interactions covering a period of three

years provides amounts to a form of ‘virtual ethnography’ fieldwork (Hine (2000). The

metaphor is here particularly apt for we aim to provide an ethnographically-oriented analysis

of the culture of encounters that has developed in this singular community and which is

ultimately founded on the ways members properly manage the location awareness and

ubiquitous computing resources made available to them by the game infrastructure. We will

use particularly significant interactions gathered from our extensive analysis of the corpus to

provide evidence for some key features of social life in the Mogi community: the fact that

locations are public and the ways in which locations and proximities between players are

made visible, recognizable and meaningful by members.

3. Location awareness as an available interactional resource

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Location awareness resources are different according to whether the player is using his mobile

phone or his web-connected PC to play. Mobile players can rely on a specific interface, the

‘radar’, which features a map with a radius of 500 meters. This map represents the player’s

environment, with his or her pictogram in the center of the mobile screen surrounded by those

of the other players and virtual objects situated within the 500 meter radius. These data are

updated with each server request4. When players are less than about 300 meters

5 from an

object they can capture it with their terminal. Each object belongs to a collection. Completing

a collection earns players points and players are classified according to the points they have

accumulated. The basic idea is to create a community of high-tech hunter-gatherers whose

activity is set in an economy based on the bartering of virtual objects and a sociability based

on text messaging.

Five important functionalities of the game are accessible. The five most important are:

- The ‘radar’ interface, as discussed above. By clicking on a sufficiently close object on

the map the player can pick it up by activating a collection module. Clicking on a

player’s icon on the screen opens up a window for text messaging.

- The module dedicated to text messaging. The addresses and messages exchanged are

accessible only within the game server. Players can create buddy lists of favourite

correspondents (Mogi friends or the members of teams to which they belong).

- The exchange and transaction module (for exchanging objects missing from one’s

collection).

- The user profile. It allows players to make all or part of the objects that they possess,

as well as the type of object they want, visible to other players.

- Public classification of players according to the number of accumulated points. This

classification is frequently consulted by players and introduces an element of

competition between them.

4 The rapidity of these connections to the game server is critical as regards the acceptability of the game. At

certain times the connection time could take 30 seconds, which was experienced as a long time by players. 5 Experience of the game is richer with a GPS terminal (the precision of geo-localization is then a matter of a few

meters) but the game also offers the possibility of localization based on triangulation between cell antennae. Experienced players have become accustomed to constantly switching from one to the other in their quest for objects since the map in cell mode is slightly different to the GPS map, due to the position of the antennae. It is therefore likely to reveal new objects in one or two clicks without the player having to move at all.

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Figure 1: The radar interface that represents the local map of the game around the player

(whose icon always appears in the center of the screen) in an area of one square kilometer.

The other players and geo-localized virtual objects appear on the map. The ‘closest Mogi-

friend’ is indicated at the bottom of the screen, with the distance even if it is more than 500

meters. This functionality was added by the designers to facilitate the ‘onscreen encounters’

discussed below.

Other forms of location awareness were made available on the game website for players

connecting through their personal computer, with slightly different interfaces and

functionalities. PC-based players can visualize maps showing their ‘mogi-friends’ and team

members, as well as geo-located virtual items, wherever they are in Japan, through extensive

maps which can be navigated at different scales. These facilities were initially introduced by

the game designers to allow fixed PC-based players to detect the position of highly coveted

objects and guide mobile players to them, a form of collaboration which we found to occur

rather frequently. The combination of mobile phone and PC-based resources for location

awareness has the very significant consequence of turning the Mogi players into a location-

aware community in which one’s location (as presented in the interfaces) and consequently

one’s change of location, become semi-public data, always potentially accessible to known

and even unknown players in the case of very close players on the mobile phone ‘radar’

interface.

Most experienced players are aware of this so they orient towards their location as something

which may be seen and noticed by other players at any time, i.e. as public data for which they

may be called to account (Licoppe and Inada, 2009a). Players even often display their

expectation that a player, or even several players, will notice where they are. In the excerpt

below, one player (T.) discusses a long and unusual trip she plans to make and indicates how

she expects others to notice it when they see the location of her icon in the maps of the game.

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Her correspondent responds by joking about it, even suggesting that it would be a pity if no-

one noticed.

Extract n°1

Mogi players therefore constitute a kind of fully location-aware community in which

members’ locations are potentially mutual and semi-public knowledge. The categorization of

players as localized and mobile entities is always relevant within the collective game activity,

and pointing towards another player’s location is a routine practice that confirms one as a

member. An immediate consequence of all this is that the current location of a given player

may be treated as a ‘safe’ mentionable topic that is always available (in principle) and

warrants the initiation of a text message interchange, as shown in the following exchange.

Extract n°2

The sequential organization of the “noticing” turn is interesting. It starts with an exclamation

that works as a ‘change of state token’ (Heritage, 1984), which marks that something

noticeable and mentionable has occurred, and invites further elaboration. This comes in the

next turn construction unit, which appears as a query about the location of the recipient which

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embeds a candidate answer. This indicates that player A was probably playing the game as a

connected PC-based player (if he had been a mobile player and sufficiently close to notice B,

then the issue of co-proximity would have arisen) and was familiar enough with B’s mobility

for the candidate location to be meaningful with background knowledge of where B usually is

or what he does. The familiarity is reinforced by the lack of preliminary greetings. The

‘query-ness’ of the utterance is moreover emphasized with a ‘question mark’ emoticon,

putting some stress on the provision of an answer: this shows that in such a community of

experienced location-aware players unusual location and displacements may be treated as

‘mentionables’ and used as a legitimate pretext for initiating interaction. Discussion of the

qualities of a particular location relevant to the other participant may be introduced and

treated as a ‘safe topic’ for text messaging.

Location is there to be seen and noticed, but mentioning it may sometimes infringe on one’s

“informational preserve” and require some specific forms of remedial interchange. For the

same reason, the way location and location changes are made visible and accessible is a

highly sensitive moral issue. Two years ago, the designers introduced a feature which

provided the name of the neighborhood in which the player was located, which became

visible when one clicked on his icon. This feature immediately aroused indignant reactions

from the players who did not want such information to be publicly divulged. Even such an

apparently insignificant piece of information as the name of the neighborhood in which they

were located (in a world in which ‘geometric’ locations and maps were already publicly

available) was seen as problematic. The reason for this was that if you knew the person well

enough, you could more easily infer, rightly or wrongly, from her/his location thus labeled

her/his engagement in some forms of activity. This proved to be too great an infringement of

personal territories. Players clearly treat location awareness as a potent interactional resource,

and most of them consider that keeping location data ‘geometric’ and therefore as ‘neutral’

and impersonal as possible minimizes the range of potential inferences and gives them more

control about the way their location may be perceived and interpreted by other players.

To summarize, the Mogi case displays a range of behaviors specifically oriented towards

location awareness. The current location of a given user is treated as a mentionable topic that

is available (in principle) and warrants offers to initiate a particular form of encounter based

on text message interchange. The categorization of users as localized and mobile entities is

always relevant within the collective game activity and pointing towards another player’s

location is a routine practice that indexes membership. Mentioning the location of another

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user is a way to produce affiliation markers and of “being familiar”. Location is there to be

seen, but noticing it may sometimes infringe on one’s “informational preserve” and require

some forms of remedial interchange. We think that such issues and behavioral orientations do

not concern only the few Japanese players of a singular and innovative location-aware game,

but are potentially relevant for any kind of community in which locations are public and are

continuously there for other members to notice. However, the actual norms of behavior which

might evolve in such location-aware communities and the way discrepancies and problems,

transgressions and fabrications are treated will depend on the details of the ongoing activities,

on local sense-making practices and cultural constraints and resources. They will be specific

to each location-aware community and constitute what counts as proper behavior and what it

means to be a member.

4. The recognition of mutual proximity without co-presence (mediated proximity)

and the management of its interactional consequences

A direct consequence of such a form of location awareness is that it provides players with a

resource to assess and sometimes monitor the distance between them. Some degree of

proximity may be inferred from noticing the location of other players. However, what does

being able to recognize proximity at a distance mean and do? Though John Urry has recently

called for the development of a ‘sociology of mobility’ which could explain why persons

travel (Urry, 2002), proximity, and more specifically the interactional consequences of

perceivable changes in proximity, have been mostly studied in the context of co-present

encounters.

The interactionist tradition has repeatedly shown how spatial distance, orientation towards

interaction and social relationships are mutually co-elaborative (Goffman, 1963; 1971; Hall,

1966). In most cultures, getting closer is treated as a display of “heightened accessibility”

(Goffman, 1963): as one participant in an informal setting gets nearer to another one, he or

she combines multimodal resources such as gaze, gestures and speech to enter into

conversation in a way which is highly sensitive to the two individuals’ mutual spatial distance

and witnessable form of mobility (Kendon, 1990). Ethnographic, interaction-oriented studies

have also shown how the achievement and recognition of ‘co-proximity’ through mutual

sightings may enact the relevance of a future face to face encounter and focused interaction.

Two Tuaregs who suddenly sight one another across the dunes as they ride their camels in the

Sahara desert will change their course so that their paths meet. Acknowledging the encounter

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is both a relevant and an expected option (Youssouf et al., 1977). In a culture marked by

constant warfare and feuding, if one of the Tuaregs appears to try to elude such an encounter,

the other would be entitled to interpret that as a sign of enmity or treachery, forecasting the

possibility of an ambush. Conversely, individuals may deliberately avoid recognizing mutual

proximities to escape the encounters such a recognition would make relevant. For instance,

they may conspicuously absorb themselves in window-gazing to avoid exchanging a gaze

with someone they know who is approaching (Sudnow, 1972), or, for strollers and would-be

shoppers stopping and looking at the goods in a Chinese fruit market, avoid the seller’s gaze

and ignore her questions (Orr, 2008).

Proximity assessments do not need embodied presence and ‘direct’ perceptual access through

sight, hearing or touch. In a world in which members have resources to interact at a distance

through an ever more sophisticated array of communication technologies (and prominently

mobile technologies), participants can discuss their locations and recognize their mutual

proximity through mediated interactions, though they are far enough from one another to

exclude any possibility of ‘direct’ perceptual access. Early research on phone conversations

suggested (landline) phone conversationalists usually did not refer explicitly to their potential

co-location in a given place (such as the same city), but that when they did mention it, this

might be a preliminary to encounters (Schegloff, 1972a, 84-85). The advent of mobile

technologies provides an increasing number of occasions for conversationalists to discuss

their locations and therefore to recognize their mutual proximities. I have shown elsewhere

that the mutual recognition of proximity in phone conversations either projected an unplanned

face to face encounter as a relevant future course of action (whose avoidance was possible but

had to be accounted for), or constituted a significant move to push a project to meet towards

practical arrangements (Licoppe, 2009). The possibility to recognize and discuss proximity at

a distance constitutes an example of the way communication networks are part of an

‘infrastructure of encounterability’ (Thrift, 2004) that extends way beyond the times and

scenes of co-present interaction.

Technological systems providing subjects with mutual location awareness provide new

formats and affordances for the chance recognition of mutual proximity, an occurrence we

will categorize here as a ‘co-proximity’ events. With locative media, co-proximity events

often become multimodal (and not just conversational, as in the case of phone conversations)

accomplishments. As to their agency, it is distributed through a complex heterogeneous socio-

technical assemblage: for example, in the Mogi game, players recognize their proximity to

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other players through the ‘living maps’ provided by the system and discuss it through instant

messaging conversations. Locative media often reshape the sense of proximity by mapping it

in an abstract geometrical space: they are actively “re-space-ing” place (Dourish, 2006) and

therefore also the sense of of proximity. Locative media also significantly ‘augment’ the

infrastructures of encounterability by increasing the number of opportunities for users to

recognize their mutual proximity and the forms of such opportunities. Again, using the Mogi

caseas a laboratory ‘in the wild’, one can ask several questions. Do the players recognize their

mutual proximity? How do they do it? Does this still project the relevance of a face to face

encounter? How are such occasions managed? How central are they to the experience of

living together in a location-aware ecology?

Figure 1 above provides an example of a situation in which a player has connected to the

game. She looks at the radar and two other connected players appear on her ‘radar’ screen.

This situation and that particular ‘living map’ interface provide an opportunity for the three

players to recognize simultaneously their proximity within a range of a few hundred meters.

Co-proximity events clearly appear here as distributed, multimodal achievements that

interweave visual iconic displays on the mobile phone and the text messages exchanged by

the players in which such events are referred to. The following text message exchange

typically starts by a direct reference by player A to the location of B, relative to his own

location, and an assessment of their situation as one of potential co-proximity:

Extract n°3:

The lack of initial greetings and the surprised smiley construct the turn as a response to a

previous action, that is, the perception of their co-presence on the mobile phone. The noticing

is done in a way that combines cognitive (recognizing onscreen co-presence) and social

concerns (onscreen co-presence as an event which it is proper to mention and to constitute as

a relevant feature of the ongoing interactional setting). The second player responds by

acknowledging the onscreen co-presence, thereby legitimizing the other player’s noticing of

the event, and confirms the co-proximity assessment. In this way, both players have turned

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their mutual sighting onscreen into a shared and mutually-acknowledged noticeable co-

proximity event relevant to an ongoing interaction. Interactions starting in this way can

regularly be found in the corpus. Such an initial recognition of mutual co-proximity

accomplished through a two-turn conventional sequence of the type “We are close. Yes we

are close” has all the features that linguistic anthropology has ascribed to greetings (Duranti,

1997). Extract 4 provides another example in which participants open their exchange by

recognizing their co-proximity and constituting it as a meaningful newsworthy event through

the same kind of opening sequence.

Extract n°4:

A slight difference lies in the fact that in his answer, player D confirms their degree of

closeness and by using an emoticon expressing surprise. This is used to indicate that the topic

of a co-present encounter is relevant, so relevant in fact that he might be able to see her at this

very moment. This suggests that such an opening sequence does more than just allow players

to exchange greetings. What it does is not oriented in a significant way towards gaming, for in

the sequences of the type we show here, as in many others, the players do not even refer to the

collection of items or the game scenario. What is actually in play here is the management of

the social consequences of location awareness, and more specifically proximity awareness,

and the way it turns a face to face encounter into a relevant and expectable course of action.

To show this, let us go back to what transpired after the first two messages in extract 3.

Extract n°3 (following)

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After about two minutes, player A sends a new message stating that player B has run away

(turn 3). Since they are not in visual contact, this message necessarily refers to the fact that

player B has disappeared from A’s screen. He marks this with repeated disappointment

emoticons, which retrospectively shows that such a course of action does not meet his

expectation. He wishes the co-proximity could have lasted, for reasons yet left unspecified by

him. She responds (turn 4) by accounting for her disappearance from his screen on the basis

of her current mobility (she took another subway line). By doing so she legitimizes his

expectation that their initial recognition of mutual proximity was projecting something, which

may appear as ‘missing’ now that she has moved farther and made it irrelevant. In message 8,

after a repair sequence, she provides a more general account of her behavior.

Extract n°3 (following):

Message 8 is an excuse. A characteristic feature of excuses (as opposed to justifications) is

that the behavior for which they account is considered as improper (Scott and Lyman, 1968).

Here, the excuse is proffered in the guise of a general maxim that one wishes to run away

when one gets very close, implying that one wishes to evade potential consequences of co-

proximity, i.e. meeting face to face, even though this is not said explicitly. Such a desire to

escape is said to be stronger when players are closer. She adds a more circumstantial excuse,

based on the fact that she has experienced many such onscreen ‘encounters’ that day.

Frequency is hinted at as mitigating the force of the co-proximity event. It provides another

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reason to ignore such events or to avoid acting upon them. Her excuse is somewhat

grudgingly accepted by player A in message 9. Extract 5 provides an interesting variant of

this situation, in which the relevance of the face to face encounter after the recognition of

mutual proximity is overtly expressed.

Extract n°5:

Here the recognition of mutual proximity by male player A is accomplished after a pair of

jokingly made greetings (message 1-2). The acknowledgement of mutual proximity in

message 3 takes a slightly different form for it appears here in third position and does not

have to ‘do’ greetings as well, as is the case when it opens the conversation. It is done through

a ‘co-mobility’ assessment. “We are in the same train” encompasses the facts that they are

close and that their icons are moving in the same direction while keeping close. It is a

tentative account (“it seems that we are in the same train”. The young female responds with a

moderate but playful acknowledgement of the situation and suggests she could come to see

him face to face. Though they will not actually meet and though her proposal to meet is

probably no more than a tease (because it is made as a hypothetical suggestion and because

she acknowledged but did not strongly ratify the proximity assessment of A), it shows

explicitly how a face to face encounter is immediately relevant after the recognition of an

enduring mutual proximity.

Because the text message corpus was rendered anonymous, we cannot directly determine the

gender of the players. However, inferences about gender can sometimes be made according

to the content of the messages. For instance, in most of the extracts discussed in this section, it

is likely that the initiator was male and the recipient female. This is not systematic, since the

participants in exchange 7 discussed below which also rests on similar opening conventions

based on the recognition of mutual proximity are probably both male. Nevertheless, the

17

exchanges of this section in which the recognition of mutual proximity is initiated by a male

player and addressed to a female player suggest a possible gendered use of the proximity-

recognition interactional device in which the fact that the recognition of mutual proximity

makes relevant the possibility of a face to face encounter is used strategically, in the hope of

eliciting a date. Conversely, in line with Goffman’s arguments about strategic interaction, that

the recognition of mutual proximity may be used strategically in this way provides additional

evidence of its performative force in projecting a possible encounter as a conventional

expectation.

To summarize, the mutual ratification of proximity by two members is a potent interactional

move because of a very general conversational device operative in many situations of

mediated interaction: if participants decide to mention and discuss their mutual proximity in

any way, thereby acknowledging it, such a recognition enacts the relevance of a co-present

encounter as a future course of action. So managing the social consequences of co-proximity

events and the entanglements of location, mobility and sociality which they entail, while

generally relevant in most contemporary mediated settings, will be a particularly salient

concern in location-aware environments which multiply the occasions for members to

recognize their mutual proximity at a distance. We have shown how this is the case in the

Mogi location-aware community, in which the mutual recognition of proximity is often

performed as a pair of opening greetings. But how do Mogi players manage the occasions for

recognizing mutual proximity and their social consequences ? How do members feel entitled

and obligated to discuss their mutual proximity and to act upon it (or authorized its

ignorance)? What kind of accounts do they provide and what kind of remedial exchange do

they perform to evade normal expectations about mutual proximity recognition and the

encounters which might ensue?

5. The singular ‘culture of proximity’ of the Mogi location-aware community

5.1. Spatial proximity between members as collective performance

The way players have been living together in the Mogi ‘hybrid ecology’ has led to the

emergence of a singular culture of proximity, oriented both towards the general concerns

which mediated co-proximity events raise and to the particulars of the setting and activity in

which they experience such events. The Mogi culture of proximity is only determined in part

by the technology itself, or by the game rules. Let us consider first the issue of the

18

acknowledgement by participants of their mediated proximity. When two players who do not

know each other come close, ignoring their proximity altogether may be warranted in an area

densely populated with players, where this will be a frequent event, as shown in the excuse

given at the end of extract 3. However, should one of the players be an expert and notice that

the other player is new to the game (for instance by checking his profile), it is expected that

she/he will actually address the novice, mention their co-proximity and grant the novice a

small gift (a low value virtual item) as a token of goodwill. If the players who realize they are

close are members of the same team, it is routinely expected that they will remark and discuss

the occasion together, however briefly. Such an orientation is displayed when players account

for failing to do this several days after the fact, as in the following message: “Hello Master. It

seems we were close to each other the other day. But I noticed only much later and I wasn't

able to confirm. Where were you? Enjoy your work today, like other days”.

Since locations are public, a third member may notice that two players she/he knows are

close, either because she/he is close to them or because though she/he is far she/he can

monitor the game maps on her/his PC. When such a situation occurs, the player will

spontaneously remark upon this by sending one of the other players a text message. This is

because, within such a community, spatial proximity of known members is deemed an event

worth noticing, all the more so when there is a great degree of spatial proximity, with the

involved players’ icons so close to each other as to appear to touch one another on the game

maps. Players call such a situation ‘cara gattai’, the ‘joining of characters’ (or icons),

sometimes shortened to ‘gattai’. Such mediated proximities are not only something one might

notice and comment upon in an offhand manner, they are also sometimes deliberately

produced and offered by their initiators to other members for appreciation. In one of the rare

occasions in which four members of the same team actually met face to face in Tokyo, the

two women players sent text messages to their women friends so that they could see and

appreciate the show for themselves. One of them had to explain the procedure to her friend to

enable her to ‘see’ such a remarkable encounter from afar: she had to become the mogi-friend

of each of the player. This she immediately did through text message request, before

commenting profusely on what she saw.

Players appreciate so much noticing and discussing mediated proximity events that they have

even elaborated an innovative way to produce such occasions. Such a practice is not part of

the ‘official’ game scenario. Participants enjoy ‘fabricating’ co-proximity events, and at

managing such ‘artificial’ proximity events in a different ‘keying’ (Goffman, 1974). The

19

possibility for such a game within the game stems from the fact that without intending it, the

designers of Mogi have left open the possibility for players to “freeze” their positions in a

given place, by getting there, connecting to the game and not refreshing their radar screen

after they have left the place. Players have been quick to discover and exploit this loophole in

the game software. This capacity may be used by a player to position her/his icon at a given

place, anticipating on the location or mobility of another player so that at some point both

icons will touch. The event will look on screen as an extreme case of mediated co-proximity,

even though the two participants (one in the know, the other not necessarily so) are physically

far apart. The whole point of such a performance is that it will be appreciated as a feat by

other players in the know (and others who might discover it by chance). Extract n°6 provides

a typical ‘cara-gattai’-related exchange.

Extract n°6:

Player A opens the IM conversation by congratulating B on a gattai performance, which

implies B’s involvement in it. She thus constitutes herself as an inadvertent witness of it (on

her PC) and treats the event as something noticeable, even outstanding (she says later that she

‘immediately’ saw it) and worthy of praise. B collaborates to the treatment of the ‘gattai’

encounter as a relevant and newsworthy topic by responding with a question which calls for

some elaboration on A’s part. He is ‘fishing’ for more comments about the performance. We

have observed several instances in which a player started an attempt to do ‘cara-gattai’ with

an unknowing target while discussing his ongoing efforts with several others. ‘Cara-gattai’ is

experienced as a public performance whose accomplishment by two core participants (one

acting deliberately and the other collaborating deliberately or participating unwittingly

through his current travels) relies on the noticing and the appreciation of an audience of

20

skilled connected players who monitor the ongoing events and assess their outcome. Sexual

hints and wordplay on touching in an intimate manner (referring to what is happening to the

avatars) while visibly aiming for harmlessness (because of the actual distance between

participants’ bodies) are common.

The practice of doing ‘cara-gattai’ is meaningful in the way that it actually disjoins co-

proximity and co-presence while preserving co-presence as an unrealistic state which it is

relevant to evoke playfully and joke upon. It shows how players make their locations doubly

accountable, with respect to the urban public spaces available for public scrutiny and

mundane embodied experience on the one hand, and with respect to collective awareness and

‘mediated’ involvements in the Mogi ‘living maps’ on the other. ‘Doing cara-gattai’ also

reveals how much the collective ethos of the game is grounded in normative expectations

about the public character of mediated proximity. As one player puts it in an interview, “one

wants to show others that we are in the same place and having fun”. The practice of ‘cara-

gattai’ testifies to the players’ commitment to that collective ethos and to the kind of public

good on which such a location-aware, leisure-oriented community is founded: creating

situations of collective fun by playing in a meaningful way with publicly noticeable locations,

mobilities and proximities at a distance.

5.2 The social management of the consequences of mutually recognized proximity

between members

Micro-events in which co-proximity is mutually perceived, but which for various reasons are

not followed either by immediate acknowledgement, or, if acknowledged, by the face to face

encounter which such a recognition projects, are most frequent. It is significant and

meaningful, and it has acquired a specific name, that of ‘near miss’. Extract 7 provides an

example in which such a status for the micro-event is used to account for such a situation.

Players A and B belong to the same team and have been interacting a lot through the game,

though they have not yet met face to face.

Extract n°7:

21

Player A starts with the conventional kind of opening which remarks upon an ongoing co-

proximity (Message 1). Player B does not respond with the usual second part (of the “yes we

are close” type). He provides an unsolicited self-localization (in the district of Shibuya). In

this context, it marks a strong orientation towards a potential face to face encounter by

immediately providing information which would be useful for arranging a meeting. After

having faced a rather long silence from A (almost eight minutes), he provides an even more

precise self-localization (now with respect to a landmark building). Coming just after the

previous one, this message reasserts more firmly his orientation towards the organization of

an encounter, as making arrangements to meet is often made through increasingly more

precise localization queries and answers. It also gives to the ongoing sequence the structure of

a summons (Schegloff, 1972b), for the repetition indicates that he expects a kind of response

from A, which he may feel particularly entitled to push for, as after all it was A who initiated

the recognition of their mutual proximity. These orientations are reinforced in his next

message, in which he directly questions A about his location, and follows up by a proximity-

founded account for the relevance of his current line of questioning. They appear to him to be

very close (at 30 meters, a quantitative estimate which indicates he is using the digital locative

affordances of his mobile game interface). Moreover, the fact that their state of close co-

proximity has been persisting for twenty minutes is probably an additional reason which

makes it worth noticing and makes organizing an encounter, or accounting for its

impossibility, relevant. A eventually responds to this last question (not doing so now though

22

connected would be problematic and potentially impolite), by another question and an account

rather than an answer about where he is. His rhetorical question in message 5 retrospectively

categorizes the ongoing event as a ‘near miss’, marking the occasion as gone and making an

encounter irrelevant, thus blocking any further move in that sense from B. He finishes his

message with a justification based on his current mobility. He is about to move away for

professional (and therefore non questionable) reasons, which implies that the current co-

proximity situation will dissolve anytime now.

The concept of ‘near miss’ reverses the definition of the term, which originated in air traffic

control settings to describe an unfortunate proximity between planes making possible a

collision, a particularly dramatic and fatal kind of ‘encounter’ which must of course be

avoided at all costs. In the Mogi setting, it characterizes an encounter which might have

occurred and should have occurred to a certain extent, but did not. So the ‘collision’ of two

players which their proximity projects is a positively valued event. What the near miss

category captures nicely in this context is the idea that not meeting after a co-proximity event

does not imply improper behavior (for which excuses and blame attribution would be

relevant), but constitutes a mundane and permissible course of events, for which justifications

might suffice if accounts are needed.

There are many ways for Mogi players to account for the non-accomplishment of a projected

encounter once co-proximity has been acknowledged and an encounter has become a salient

possibility. If there are many players around, as is the case in urban centers, the sheer

frequency of such occasions provides a good reason for evading them. There are also gender

issues. Female players are wary of meeting male members this way. Some declare that when

they get close to another player they often log out of the game so as to become invisible or

freeze the location of their icon so as to make their position meaningless with respect to

proximity inferences. Gendered concerns can be compounded by issues of place. Mediated

co-proximity may occur in a place which one of the participants considers to be her/his

territory and with respect to which she/he will be wary of any form of encroachment.

Foremost among such places is the home. The proximity of another player takes a different

meaning if one of the participants is a woman and if she is at home when it occurs. If the other

player is not communicating by text messages, she may perceive the co-proximity as a threat

and the situation as a case of what players have called ‘stalking’ (Licoppe and Inada, 2009b).

This incidentally shows how text messaging is so central to the game experience that a silence

is often considered impolite (it is better to log out of the game and ‘disappear’ altogether) and

23

even ominous in certain circumstances. It also shows how the definition of what may count as

transgressive behavior is shaped by the affordances provided by the game environment,

particularly those related to location awareness and communication. Alleged cases of

‘stalking’ may be rare, but they are treated very seriously by players. This seriousness

provides further evidence of how the collective management and enjoyment of occasions of

mediated co-proximity between players constitute a core tenet of their location-aware culture

and its moral order.

6. Conclusion

This paper has provided an analysis of the way many interactions and encounters in a non-

experimental and enduring location-aware community display a strong orientation towards

location and proximity concerns. It has showed how one of its crucial features is the public

character of positional data. Because players’ locations (i.e. absolute locations, as well as

relative locations with respect to one another) are available to various categories of other

members, interactional practices within the game environment have turned the noticing of a

player’s position by others into a mundane occurrence. Players orient towards the fact that

their location might be remarked and commented upon all the time. Such noticing is usually

performed so as to turn the current location of a given player into a meaningful event (e.g.

presenting such location as unusual, or remarking on an occasional co-proximity) which is

therefore worthy of notice. Location becomes a ‘mentionable’ item that can be discussed

between acquainted players. It is a ‘safe topic’ to initiate or fill an encounter. The semi-public

character of location and travel in the location-aware environment has thoroughly shaped

members’ sense of place and mobility.

Location awareness also provides users with resources and frames to recognize their mutual

co-proximity when they happen to be close while not co-present in any embodied sense. The

recognition of such mutual proximity at a distance can be performed in many different ways

in mediated environments: e.g. announcing a trip to the place of residence of the recipient,

and therefore a likely future co-proximity, by letter or by email, discussing mutual current

location and ‘discovering’ mutual co-proximity in mobile phone conversations, etc. However,

locative media which support collective location awareness significantly increase the number

of occasions for recognizing co-proximity and the shapes of what may count as such an

occurrence. Moreover, a general interactional device seems to operate in all these

environments. The mutual recognition of proximity either makes a co-present encounter a

24

relevant and expectable future course of action, or advances such a project. The particular

ways in which co-proximity are perceived and acknowledged and the projected encounter is

managed are, however, artfully adjusted to each setting and the circumstances of the occasion.

We have shown that such a device is highly relevant and operative in the Mogi location-aware

ecology, though reshaped to fit its particular conventions and resources (e.g. instances of co-

proximity are made visible in the game’s living maps and they can be seen by both

participants before any kind of conversation starts between them).

The management of proximity events and their potential consequences constitutes a strong

and even central concern for the members of the Mogi location-aware community. As soon as

they have logged on to the game (and regular users indeed stay connected most of the time),

they are exposed to the possibility of discovering that they are close to another member, and

this may occur many times a day for players living in dense urban areas even though the

overall number of players never exceeded two thousand in the whole of Japan. A whole

culture of proximity has evolved among Mogi players. It is made up of various emerging rules

and sense-making practices which precisely aim at harnessing the power of recognition of

mutual proximity and to regulate when, where, how and between whom mutual proximity can

or should be acknowledged and when the encounter it makes relevant should actually be

organized or evaded. Proximity is not treated as a current state of affairs, but as a performance

offered to the players for enjoyment and public assessment. Creating ‘artificial’ co-proximity

has even become a game within the game invented by users. It shows how important the

management of such occurrences is to their collective ethos as a location-aware community.

The research approach developed here which treats location awareness as a driver of new

forms of entanglement between place and sociality, of which mediated co-proximity events

are a striking example, will be relevant to the study of any kind of location-aware group

engaged in a collective activity. One can foresee how location-aware mobile service workers

or repairmen of the kind described in previous ethnographies (Orr, 1996) and discovering

their mutual proximity on their mobile communication devices might use it as a resource to

organize to have lunch together, for example, and talk shop. One can also anticipate the kind

of difficulties which might occur when partners or close friends become location-aware in this

manner. This would not be just for fear of control as is usually thought, but also because even

between benevolent participants, mutually noticing mediated proximities while wishing to

evade the face to face encounters whose possibility they make relevant may be a very delicate

and relationship-threatening matter when it involves an intimate person. The fact that Mogi

25

players subscribe to the game independently (i.e. usually not with their partner or their

friends) and keep Mogi-related relationships within the game environment as much as

possible makes a lot of sense. It may help to avoid the relational pitfalls involved in the

management of co-proximity events between ‘real life’ partners and long time friends.

Nevertheless, as computing becomes more ubiquitous and location-based technologies

become widespread, supporting various forms of location and proximity recognition, the

social management of mediated co-proximity, entangling place and encounter on the one hand

and mobility and sociality on the other, will become a more and more salient concern for the

forms of life who will evolve in such information ecologies. The Mogi game and the culture

which has developed among its players may seem peculiar in some respects, but the issues

that it addresses are very general and central to our understanding of the future uses of

locative media.

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