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Mediated proximity and its dangers in a location-aware community:

A case of ‘stalking’

Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada

Final version of this draft was published as:

Licoppe, C., & Inada, Y. (2009). Mediated co-proximity and its dangers in a location-aware

community: A case of stalking. In de Souza e Silva, A., & Sutko, D. M. (Eds.), Digital

Cityscapes: Merging digital and urban playspaces, New York: Peter Lang, pp.100-126.

Introduction

The development of location-aware systems has been understood as a promising and original

way to enrich urban experience and mobility-related practices by articulating a mediated

plane of interaction (through screen-based devices) provided with location affordances, and

the ‘real’ plane of mundane, embodied, presence-saturated activities. Location-aware

technologies in action engender ‘hybrid ecologies’ (Crabtree & Rodden, 2007), and may

usefully be described as ‘technologies of spatiality’, constituting new types of relationship

between experiences of place and space (Dourish, 2007). Some pioneering experiments in

location-aware gaming, such as those of the UK-based Equator consortium (Uncle Roy all

around you or Treasure), have shown through a combination of computing innovation and

social science how players develop tactics and strategies that combine reconstructed

experiences of urban mobilities (through ‘sensitivity’ to network connectedness) and

incorporated knowledge of real cities in their navigations of virtual representations (Barkhuus

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et al., 2005). Because such games are played on a relatively small geographical scale they

enable encounters in which players are confronted simultaneously with other players in the

physical space, and with their virtual representation on screen in the digital game.

The study of such games may not be fully satisfying if one is interested in grasping

empirically what the experience of location-aware, city-based social life might be about. The

settings were mostly experimental trials, with two consequences: a) users played the game

once, or at most a few times and b) the gameplay had a relatively limited spatial extension

(that of a campus, or a neighbourhood). The short time scale on which they were played

prevented players from ‘inhabiting’ or ‘dwelling’ collectively and enduringly in the hybrid

ecology of the gameplay, and evolving into a location-aware community with a specific,

interactively stabilized, normative culture, as in massively multiplayer online games

(MMOGs) (Steinkuhler, 2007) or commercial location-based services such as Dodgeball

(Humphreys, 2006). The limited space extension makes the issue of coordinating onscreen

visibility and co-present encounters more salient. If the game is played across an extended

city or a whole country, a lot of the coordination that location-awareness enables will happen

at a distance, beyond the range of co-present interaction.

In this paper we analyse a commercial location-aware collection game named Mogi

that was played throughout Japan between 2003 and 2006. Such a research setting provides an

invaluable vantage point from which to understand how a location-aware community may

develop a particular location-sensitive culture. In a sense, we had the opportunity to perform a

‘virtual ethnography’ (Hine, 2000) of a location-aware community. Beyond the specifics of

our case study, many of our observations are more generally relevant to collective behaviour

in any location-aware setting.

Among the many events which may occur in location-aware ‘hybrid ecologies’, we

have found that ‘mediated co-proximity events’ in which players ‘discover’ their mutual

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proximity through location affordances (that make location available and promote awareness

and accountability of positions) are especially important for two reasons: a) this is one of the

most frequent forms of location-based social ‘encounter’ in such environments; and b) the

proper management of mediated proximity events (recognizing being close through the

location awareness affordances) constitutes the kind of interactional order on which location-

aware public spaces rest (Licoppe, 200). For instance, the co-occurrence of two players on

their mobile phone screen is expected to be noticed (especially when the distance between

them is small and even more so when one of the players is at home). Moreover, awareness of

mutual proximity projects a face-to-face encounter as a relevant (but neither unavoidable nor

necessary) outcome, whose occurrence or non-occurrence is usually managed through text

message interactions.

Mediated proximity events may run awry. When they do, how do they go wrong? How

are cases recognized and assessed as problematic? How are suspicious proximities managed?

What kind of collective action may develop in response? How is such collective participation

framed by the location-related resource and constraints of the game platform? These questions

offer resources for the analyst to understand the kind of interactional order that characterizes

location-aware hybrid ecologies. For instance, in some particularly suspicious cases, the

situation might even be interpreted as an instance of ‘stalking’. Then the participants usually

try to figure out whether it is a chance occurrence or the consequence of some deceitful

manipulation of location awareness resources by an ill-intended player. ‘Stalking’ is one of

the main ways in which mediated proximity events may go wrong. ‘Stalking’ is a crucial issue

for any kind of location aware community, for it directly threatens the roots of the social order

that may develop there. More generally, the social management of unusual proximities is

bound to be a key concern in the politics of location aware communities. For if a public space

is defined by the way its members ‘appear’ in it (Arendt, 1958), the specificity of a location-

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aware society and the kind of collective good on which it rests are related to the ways

members may mutually appear as ‘proximate’ and manage such mediated proximity-based

‘encounters’. The purpose of this paper is to analyze in detail a particular instance of stalking,

and the type of collective action that emerges around it. We will describe the basic principles

of the Mogi game, and analyze in detail the text messages exchanged between three players

after one of them starts worrying the proximity of another player might be ill-intended.

1. Mogi: the basic principles of a location-aware public collection game

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

(Licoppe & Guillot, 2005). The game was commercialized at the end of 2003 in Japan by the

operator KDDI. The gameplay consisted in collecting virtual objects with a mobile phone.

Different types of collectible objects were continuously being designed and ‘placed’ by the

game designers. Each object belonged to a collection (all kinds of items were introduced by

the designers, some with distinctive spatio-temporal propertiesi). Completing a collection

earned points, and players were classified according to the points accumulated. Objects were

‘localized’ in the sense that users could act on them and capture them only when they were

within two hundred meters of their own positionii. In a nutshell, the idea was to create a

community of high-tech location-aware ‘hunter-gatherers’ whose activity was set in an

economy based on the bartering of virtual objects and a sociability based on text messaging.

Location-aware systems may provide different types of location information: position

of items and other players (in the geometrical sense of space coordinates), distance between

self and other entities, direction of others with respect to self, and names for the location of

other entities (Weilenmann & Leuchovius, 2004). The way in which such information is

implemented and presented in the graphic interface constitute an important resource with

respect to for the kind of collective behaviour that may emerge from playing the game. The

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Mogi game we studied provides distance and direction, so that it allows the perception and the

monitoring of the relative positions of players and items within the game plane. For location

purposes, the players rely on a special interface available on their mobile phone, the ‘radar’ It

features a map of all game-related resources within a radius of 500 metres. Such a map

represents the player's environment, with his or her pictogram in the centre of the mobile

screen, surrounded by those of the other players and virtual objects within that range. The

‘closest Mogi-friend’ is indicated at the bottom of the screen, with the person’s distance, even

if it she/he is more than 500 metres away. These data are updated with each server request.

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

The functionalities of the game are accessible from the main menu. The five most

important are:

1. The ‘radar’ interface. By clicking on a sufficiently close object on the map the player

can pick it up by launching a collection module. Clicking on a player’s icon on the screen

opens a window for text messaging.

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

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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).

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

collection).

4. The user profile: players can choose to make visible all or part of the items in the

inventory of objects that they possess, as well as their type.

5. Public ranking classification of players according to the number of accumulated

points. This ranking is frequently consulted by players and encourages competition between

them.

It is also possible to log onto Mogi on a PC, from a website. In this case the interfaces

and functionalities are different. The Web interface includes a chat function not accessible on

mobile terminals. Its main function is to allow PC-based players to visualize maps on all

scales, showing other players and items throughout the current gameplay (i.e., all of Japan).

PC players can pinpoint the position of highly coveted objects or unusual movements of

known players. This is well known among Mogi players and has the very important

consequence of turning them into a location-aware community.

Location awareness is accomplished in two ways:

- through the GPS system, which localizes features with a precision of 3-10 meters.

- through cell triangulation which has a precision of a few hundred meters. In this mode,

locations can still be represented in the game maps but they can not support precise

forms of monitoring, for the represented location may be a few hundred meters away

from the ‘actual one. Players called this mode the ‘Kanisokui’iii

.

Since the two modes are available, players are able to switch from one to the other

whenever they wanted to.

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Most players avoid meeting face-to-face and often avoid proposals to do so. They

likewise rarely exchange their mobile email addresses, so that most of their text messages are

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

interactions that are initiated in the course of Mogi playing are mostly kept within its

infrastructure.

2. On-screen co-proximity events and their dangers

The location affordances provided within the Mogi gameplay allow their positions to become

a public feature within the community of players. They also provide players with a sense of

whom and what is close to them, and how close, i.e. mediated proximity (mediated by the

screens and applications of computers or mobile phones). Mediated proximity occurs between

individuals who cannot see one another in the usual, embodied way. This leads to original

forms of ‘encounters’ that elsewhere we have labelled ‘onscreen encounters’ (Licoppe &

Inada, 2006). Since locations are treated as ‘public’ information within the community of

members (in the sense that players orient towards the possibility that other players may be

monitoring and remarking upon their location at any time), such ‘co-proximities’ are also

‘public’ in the same sense: they can potentially be noticed and remarked upon by other

players. Mogi is particularly interesting in that respect, because it provides players with many

opportunities to assess their mutual distance as a form of proximity (two players consider they

are ‘close’ when they appear simultaneously on their mobile phone ‘radar interface’. Players

have even given such events an English name, that of ‘near miss’ Mogi players have

developed conventional ways to notice such encounters, plausible reasons to account for not

noticing them, and social rules determining proper ways to behave when engaged in them,

such as expert players having to notice new players when they are co-proximate, and to give

them one item of small value as a kind of goodwill gift (Licoppe & Inada, 2006 ; 2009).

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Some players may nevertheless display a negative orientation towards mediated co-

proximity events. They will display this by immediately logging out of the game when

another player close to them logs in, to avoid the interactional consequences of such a co-

proximity event. Players who ‘discover’ another one close by, and see her/him logging off in

this way, may infer that such behaviour is likely to be a response to their occasioned ‘co-

proximity’, in the form of a deliberate effort to break away from it. As one player recalls: “I

suppose this person was at home. When I got to about three kilometres from her, she logged

out. I went on driving, and when I got far from her, she logged on again. It may be too much

to deduce that from such limited cues she mistook me for a stalker, but still…”

Goffman (1971) has shown that the routine management of the interactional order

necessarily t provided resources for ill-intended persons to use the way we usually disattend

‘normal appearances’, to manage impressions and fabricate deceitful frames of interaction.

Since one peculiarity of the Mogi public order of interaction is precisely the proper

management of screen-mediated co-proximity events, it is not surprising that participants may

occasionally treat them as potentially threatening. This happens when one of them feels he or

she has grounds to suspect that the other player involved got close on purpose and not by

chance. In the Mogi players’ vocabulary, such behaviour is ‘stalking’. This is slightly

different from the usual English sense, which implies the idea of repeated breaches of

intimacy.

3. A potential case of ‘stalking’: detailed case analysis

Our research is based on interviews with the players and on analyses of the messages

exchanged by players on the game server. The game designers gave us access to that corpus

after changing all names of players and places to ensure anonymity. From this corpus we

extracted one significant case of proximity between players that was treated as a possible

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instance of ‘stalking’. The player who felt threatened was a young female player (so that

stalking appears to be a highly gendered issue), who happened to be at home. Home is a

special place, even in such a ‘hybrid ecology’, and the suspicious proximity of another player

becomes all the more unwarranted and potentially threatening. The case was resolved without

any harm occurring to the ‘threatened’ player, and without any proof of wrongdoing on the

part of the ‘threatening’ player. The case I analyze here started rather late, with the player

Aki, a teenage girliv

, at home

3.1.The public framing of a co-proximity event as a potential case of stalking: between

compassion and indignation

1. Aki to Ben (22:35:21): I’m going away v because there’s a Mogi player very very close

vi to

my home and it scares me (2 ‘sweat’ pictograms)

2. Ben to Aki (22:41:04): It’s a good thing you noticed ((‘impatient’ smiley)) You must

always be careful because you’re a teenage girl ((‘angry’ smiley))

3. Ben to Aki (23:01:59): You didn’t get into troublevii

4. Aki to Ben (23:04:18): I’m here ((‘cunning smiley’, hand and twinkling

pictograms))

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In message 1, player Aki informs player Ben, one of her Mogi friends, that another

player is very close to her home. She uses an expression that means extremely close or

surprisingly close. This may count as an “extreme case formulation”, used in ordinary

conversations to objectify the facts which are discussed and to warrant accounts and

complaints (Pomerantz, 1984). This particular form of assessment is followed by the

formulation of an emotional state (‘it scares me’), which thus appears as a consequence of

such uncalled-for proximity. Message 1 can be seen as a first mention of a new topic; it

constitutes the current situation as a problem that is to be talked about and shared with another

player from her team who lives a thousand miles away.

The situation is constructed as problematic on two different levels which call for two

different types of response and involvement from the recipient: a) a breach of propriety and

privacy, that requires others to help her to assess the facts and the extent of the threat and, if

necessary, more work to impute responsibility and claims for reparation in order to restore a

sense of justice; and b) as a threat to her as a person, which makes her suffer. The display of

her suffering then prompts fellow players to display related emotions, support and care. These

two regimes of involvement have been described by Boltanski (1999) in his analysis of

responses to public displays of suffering (particularly at a distance), where he called them the

‘regime of justice’ and the ‘regime of love’.

This is given as the reason for her announcement that she is logging out. Ben responds

with two separate messages expressing concern. In message 4, about twenty minutes after

message 1, she announces that she is back. The expression she had used for logging out meant

‘I am going outside’, while the expression she uses to inform him that she has logged in again

is a conventional formula, routinely used in Japanese to mark the action of entering home. It

is addressed to members of the domestic communityviii

and displays co-presence-related

obligations to it (Bonnin, 2002). The use of such expressions to describe game-related actions

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precisely, when another player is potentially infringing, through his embodied proximity, on

her home as a physical and personal place, posits ‘being home’ as a complex and hybrid kind

of experience. It combines a sense of being at home in a familiar, domestic place, while also

being ‘home’ in the gameplay, connected to one’s Mogi friends through the mediation of

maps and text messaging. Feeling comfortable ‘being at home’ in such a hybrid ecology

depends on a proper management of the boundaries between home as a locale (and the locus

of a certain type of embodied experiences), and home as a locatedness within the spatial

distribution of location resources provided with Mogi. The unwanted and mysterious

proximity of another, little-known player, threatens to disrupt the very possibility of

articulating the two kinds of experience in a single, ‘being-at-home-and-connected-to-Mogi’

experience, which is both ‘domestic’ and public. How does the recipient react, beyond his

initial shows of concern?

5. Aki to Ben (23:04:50): I did not get into any trouble ((satisfied cat, and two

musical note pictograms)) miaoww

6. Ben to Aki (23:05:52): Seriously, this is scary ((smiley marking failure)) Fortunately,

nothing happened to you. ((‘smiling’ smiley and ‘two hearts’ pictograms))

7. Aki to Ben (23:06:52): Thank youix

(( ‘cunning’ smiley, curved arrow pointing

upwards spark)) I wonder what he meant to do ((‘embarrassed’ smiley))

8. Ben to Aki (23 :07 :48): Who was he

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9. Aki to Ben (23:11:00): He is someone called [X] ((‘embarrassed’ smiley and

teardrop))

10. Ben to Aki (23:15:47): It is really scary ((‘disappointed’ smiley)) Be careful for there

are all kinds of people. ((index finger pointing upward))

After Aki has logged in again, she goes on exchanging with player Ben about the

previous situation. In message 6, Ben provides an assessment of what has happened as

something scary, marking it as an occurrence that deserves attention and scrutiny. Moreover,

through the imputation of ‘scariness’, he performs an alignment of his emotional state with

hers. He is displaying his experiencing of similar emotions at a distance, that is, being scared

by proxy, before expressing pleasure in the fact that by chance nothing seems to have

happened to her. In a sense, he is still responding to her display of anxiety in message 1, in the

emotion- and empathy-oriented regime engagement.

This alignment makes it sequentially relevant for her to move back to the other

form of involvement that she has prompted. She reorients their exchange from the

construction and display of a compassionate engagement by Ben, towards a discussion of the

intention of the alleged ‘stalker’ (messages 7-9). Ben stays in tune by moving towards

generality and potentially associating X with a class of dangerous persons (Message 10). This

work of de-singularizing the unknown player, of assessing his intentions and dispositions in a

more objective way, and of generalizing the case at hand as one encounter among many

possible others of the same kind, is relevant to a justice-oriented treatment of the problem, in

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the name of the collective good of the Mogi community. Aki and Ben therefore alternate

between the two possible treatments of others’ suffering, the grammar of compassion (where

a legitimate claim is actualized by the surge of emotion, through displays of empathy and

solidarity between equals, confronted to a singular situation), and the grammar of

‘denunciation’ which calls for justice and requires objectification and qualification of facts

(Boltanski, 1999).

Things could have remained this way, had X moved away. But this is not the case. It

will lead to a greater involvement of Ben and even another player in support of Aki, as we

will now see.

3.2.The escalation of involvements in support of the allegedly ‘stalked’ player

11. Aki to Ben (23:22:04): He’s still close ((two ‘sweat’ pictograms))

12. Ben to Aki (23:23:46): Is he? ((upward pointing index finger)) I’ll also watch this [X]-

I-don’t-know-who by putting him on my list of Mogi friendsx. ((upward pointing index

finger)) He’s about 200 metres from you ((sweat or teardrop))

13. Ben to X (23:26:28): What are you doing Go play Mogi in other places ((upward

pointing index finger))

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14. Ben to Aki (23:35:51): Right now he’s vanished ((upward pointing index finger)) I’ve

sent him a message of warning but be careful in any case ((embarrassed smiley))

16. Aki to Ben (23:41:22): What did you tell him

20. Ben to Aki (23:44:36): I told him to have fun elsewhere but he didn’t even answer this is

worrying (upward pointing index finger) I’m sorry (teardrop or sweat) I’ll watch

the radar for you until 12:00p.m. So you can play without worrying until midnight.

22. Aki to Ben (23:45:27): Thank you (two sad smileys)

In message 11, Aki indicates that X has stayed close and repeats her expression of

anxiety through the ‘sweat’ pictograms. Such a repetition can be interpreted as a summons,

calling for relevant actions, as yet unaccomplished (Schegloff, 1972). Ben treats it

accordingly, by uttering a list of the actions he will now take in support of Aki. First he

announces that he will put X on his list of friends, which will allow him to monitor the

location of X, and to assess the relative positions of X with respect to Ben (which is probably

done on the spot, considering the end of message 12). It is remarkable that he will do this

from a distance, since he lives one thousand miles away, on another island altogether. Second,

he takes the initiative of addressing X directly, sending him a message inquiring about his

current intentions, and enjoining him to move (message 13)—a message which will

eventually be left unanswered. He then almost immediately informs Aki that he has text-

messaged a warning to X (message 14), and she responds by asking him what he wrote

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(message 15). These two different actions radically alter his ‘footing’ in subtle ways. His

monitoring of the relative locations of the two other player turns him into a sort of

‘overlooker-at-a-distance’, while being a ratified distant participant in a two-way open

interaction (with respect to Aki), and a bystander requesting attention and ratification of

communication rights (with respect to X). His actions clearly display an increased

involvement with the situation. This escalation is sequentially relevant, for it is accomplished

so as to appear as a response to the summons in message 14.

His telling her what he told X in message 20 triggers further mention that his message

to X was left unanswered, immediately followed by a reassessment of the case as serious.

This orients towards a general assumption of players that, in a situation of mediated co-

proximity with another player, one is entitled to infer from that player’s silence that he or she

might harbour ill intentions. In a social world where location-related information is public,

players expect that their positions may be noticed and remarked upon, so that they might have

to account for them, especially when they are noticeably close to another player, as in the case

of co-proximity events. Ignoring such requests opens the way to suspicious inferences, and

warrants seeking the support of other players. Therefore, everything that has happened in the

previous messages between Aki and Ben (Aki’s displays of emotion and concern, her

repeatedly seeking Ben’s involvement, his own involvement) is made retrospectively

legitimate in some sense by Ben’s mention of X’s lack of response. This provides a sequential

slot for one more display of involvement by Ben, who promises that he will monitor the

‘geographical’ situation until late into the night. Aki acknowledges and ratifies this escalation

of Ben’s involvement by thanking him for it, with an explicit mention of his name that

personalizes her thanks. Her marks of gratitude are responsive and adjusted to the multiple

signs he has given of increased concern and involvement (message 22).

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We have chosen to arrange messages according to the time they were logged in the

server. Readers may have remarked that extract 3 is therefore missing a few messages. What

happened was that in between her messages to Ben, Aki had been ‘talking’ to another player

Chiba (a male player, who is often in the same area as her, and who belongs to the same team)

so that another thread of messages was interwoven with the Aki-Ben thread. We will now

include it into the analysis.

3.3. Involving a third party in the micromanagement of the threatening situation: the

emergence of collective action

15. Aki to Chiba (23:39:51): I did itxi

((tired smiley, two sweat pictograms))

16. Aki to Ben (23:41:22): What did you tell him

17. Chiba to Aki (23:41:57): If one uses Kani Sokui one cannot know one’s exact

geographical location ((sweat pictogram))

18. Aki to Chiba (23:43:20): I didn’t know that (tired smiley, two sweat pictogram).

In fact, Ben warned him. ((tired smiley, teardrop or sweat))

19. Chiba to Aki (23:44:22): Who’s that person xii

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20. Ben to Aki (23:44:36): I’ve told him to have fun elsewhere but he didn’t even answer this

is worrying ((upward pointing index finger)) I’m sorry ((teardrop or sweat)) I’ll

monitor the radar for you until midnight So you can play without worrying, until midnight.

21. Aki to Chiba (23:44:55): The person’s name is [X] ((upward pointing index,

teardrop or sweat))

22. Aki to Ben (23:45:27): Thanks. ((sad smiley))

In message 15, Aki informs player Chiba that she has logged in again. He replies in message

17 with advice of using ‘Kani Sokui’. This shows that she has been communicating with

player Chiba before, probably through their mobile mail addresses However, after she has

logged in again, they exchange messages through the Mogi game server.

Message 17, which refers to her logging back in, is presented as a general Mogi-

related matter, so that it can be directly applied to the situation at hand (and the ‘one’, in ‘one

cannot know one’s your exact location’, may be replaced by X and more specifically Aki, as

pronouns are often omitted in Japanese). Both an older and a more experienced Mogi player,

Chiba adopts a stance of epistemic authority towards Aki. Message 17 is an advice, or more

probably the rationale that underlies a prior advice. It has protective undertones. She replies to

him by acknowledging receipt of that information, marked as new, and goes on mentioning

that Ben has tried to get in touch with X by sending him a message. This item of knowledge

about Ben acquires newsworthiness performatively, through the very utterance that mentions

it. Chiba is thus informed about what has been going on between Aki and Ben. What Ben

does is posited by Aki as relevant to Chiba’s perspective and actions. Aki actually invites

Chiba, who is also supportive and involved, as a party to a form of emergent collective action:

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by not orienting immediately to this piece of news and asking instead about the identity of X,

Chiba somehow acknowledges Aki’s proposed involvement of him as a potential bystander to

her exchanges with Ben., while he displays his readiness to be involved by his orientation

towards getting all the facts of the case.

23. Ben to Chiba (23:47:32): It seems there was a player that came very close Aki-san is

scared. Chiba-san you too help her. ((flexed arm))

This is about the moment that Ben chooses to try on his own to involve Chiba in support of

Aki (Message 23). The way he does it mimics the message through which Aki initially tried

to involve him (Message 1), but in an indirect quotation mode. He mentions the great

proximity of a player to Aki as something reported to him (and therefore worthy of attention

and scrutiny), and goes on by describing the emotional state of Aki. The message replicates

once again that particular structure inviting involvement which moves from a ‘factual’

statement (which may trigger inquiries about the characteristics of the situation, prior to an

understanding of which collection of facts it fits into) to an emotional account (which may

trigger solidarity-based displays of concern and responsive emotions from equals or peers).

Ben follows up with a direct request for help. The fact that it is addressed to Chiba is

(implicitly) warranted by the fact that Ben knows that Chiba lives close to Aki, and is a

member of the same team and a respected player. Ben tries to enrol Chiba in support of Aki.

The request is not openly granted but positively acknowledged through Chiba’s thanks to Ben

(personalized with an explicit mention of Ben’s name). However in between, we find a

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complex entanglement of the two interaction threads, which furthers the emergence of

collective action.

3.4.Collective mobilization of a triad of ‘distant’ players: in defence of a common good

24. Chiba to Aki: (23:47:40): I don’t know him ((teardrop or sweat)) I hope it was just

by chance that he came close to you ((teardrop or sweat))

25. Ben to Aki (23:48:44): In case you feel that something might happen to you ask -Chiba-

san to help you. ((upward pointing finger)) the best thing is to run away ((raised

thumb))

26 Aki to Chiba (23:49:29): He was first at 1 km from me but then at 300 m from me!

Afterwards, I asked Ben and he told me he was at 200 m from me ((sad smiley))

27. Chiba to Ben (23:50:36): Thank youxiii

((smiling smiley)) Ben

28. Aki to Ben (23:50:38): I told it to Chiba-nii.xiv

((sad smiley, sweat)) since it scares

me I can’t do MogiMogi and still have fun. ((tired smiley, teardrop or sweat))

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Message 24 (sent almost at the same time as the message in which Ben tries to enroll

Chiba) and message 26 constitute an ‘adjacent’ pair within the Aki-Chiba interaction thread

that builds on the previous naming of X (in message 21). Chiba informs Aki that he does not

know X. Her answer (message 26) elaborates substantially on the details of X’s proximity, by

stating his successive and decreasing distances with respect to her (expressed distance with

actual numbers probably through the mediation of her radar interface). The successive

decreasing numbers aim to provide the recipient with a sense of how she experienced X’s

getting closer and closer to her (she uses the ‘noni’ conjunction marking opposition and

surprise). The latest and closest distance was actually provided by Ben, at her request: the

proximity of X is now shared and objectified. This elaboration of the description of the

situation, placed just after his wish that the whole thing were just a chance occurrence, works

to make that interpretation implausible. What has just happened is constructed as a serious

and urgent matter, which calls for attention, and probably the taking of some action.

Between these two messages, Ben had suggested to Aki that she should get in touch

with Chiba if this went on. He had then added that the best course of action on her part was to

‘move’, that is, to log out of the game altogether. Since she had already done that before, this

message was not meant to be informative. Instead, it pointed towards possible future

arrangements that she alone might accomplish. It can therefore be read as the end of the list of

the actions he had taken in response to Aki’s urgency-laden restatement of her ongoing

predicament (Message 11), that is, as a delineation of the limits to his current involvement.

28. Aki to Ben (23:50:38): I told Chiba-nii. ((sad smiley, sweat)) since it scares me I

can’t go on playing Mogi. ((tired smiley, teardrop or sweat))

21

In her response (message 28) Aki informs Ben that she has been exchanging messages

with Chiba and that she has also informed him of the situation (so that he may infer that Chiba

is also supporting her). To his marking the limits of his personal involvement, she responds

by broadening his perspective and placing him as one among two informed and supportive

players, that is, as a party to a larger frame of collective action (which is also a way to ‘free’

him of any guilt he might feel in logging out and leaving her alone). Interestingly, this is the

very moment she chooses to reiterate her expression of fright and to state that it makes her

incapable of playing or, more precisely, of playing and taking any sort of pleasure in playing.

Such a conversational move frames the ongoing situation as a more general issue. It

constitutes a potential threat to the kind of collective good that is at the core of the Mogi

experience (taking pleasure in playful use of geolocation affordances), and therefore to what

binds them as a social group within a particular kind of public space. Should the ‘stalking’ be

confirmed as such, and/or should they prove collectively unable to manage the kind of

situation that ensues from such a wild, mediated proximity, it could be impossible for

anybody to take pleasure in playing Mogi any more. Taking pleasure in playing Mogi together

and exploiting the resources of location awareness is precisely the collective good that binds

the Mogi players into a social group. What appears at stake is the very foundation of their

common world.

This reformulation of her plight occasions a reformulation of the collective

engagement and communication pattern of the three players.

29. Ben to Chiba (23:51:45): Okayxv

it’s a guy called [X].We’ll be wary of him ((upward

pointing finger))

22

30. Ben to Aki (23:54:27): Yes I told himxvi

too. ((upward pointing index)) He’s

watching now so it’s okay . ((happy smiley))

31. Aki to Ben (23:55:46): Thank you very much ((smiley with tears in the eye,

twinkling)) Ben is the hero of Aki. ((snake charmer, satisfied cat, two upward

pointing curved arrows))

In his response to Chiba’s thanks (message 24), Ben informs Chiba of the name of the

alleged stalker. Interestingly, he binds himself to Chiba by then stating that together they will

monitor what X does. He thus performs a triadic relationship in which he and Chiba constitute

a ‘we’, made of two peers, involved in supporting threatened fellow player Aki. In a sense,

message 30 closes the interaction loop. It brings about a situation in which not only are all the

pairs in the triad communicating through text messaging, but each member of the triad also

knows that the other two are doing the same thing, and that they know he or she knows. .

They make a kind of public space in which what is said between two parties is not directly

available to the others but may legitimately be mentioned at any time by any of them.

Chiba’s answer to Ben starts by “thanks” which are made heavily emotional by the

adjunction of expressive pictograms (smile plus tear in the eye). They are also followed by a

performative statement which qualifies Ben as her hero. This assessment is both retrospective

(for what he has done to support her) and prospective (for he and Chiba will now monitor the

evolution of the situation and she is not alone any more in her confrontation with the alleged

stalker). They have become a triad engaged in the joint project of managing the ongoing,

23

potentially threatening situation in which members play different roles. Ben (and implicitly

Chiba) have become knight-heroes in two senses: they defend her (as she increasingly adopts

the stance of the damsel in distress, through her use of cute invented transformations of

ordinary words that we cannot render here), and they defend the Mogi experience and

community by involving themselves in the management of the very kind of situation that

threatens it most.

3.5. Closings and closure

The Ben-Chiba interaction thread

A first indication that the situation is moving towards some kind of stabilization is the fact

that Ben and Chiba will exchange only one more message, a few minutes later.

36. Chiba to Ben (00:01:00): In Tokyo and around Tokyo there are sometimes ‘near

misses’xvii

. ((teardrop or sweat)) It happened a few times to me too and I had to be

carefulxviii

((sweat)) particularly when the other is ((face of a woman))

((tired

smiley)) in any case Aki temporarily uses the Kanisokui mode as I told her to do and one

won’t be able to locate her ((upward pointing index)) It may be by chance but let’s watch

what happens ((sweat)) Anyway it’s better to be in control ((angry smiley))

That this is the ‘last’ message in the thread is significant in itself. The absence of any

message after this one shows that the situation no longer calls for active re-elaborations of

their joint involvement. The urgency is ebbing away. This is also a ‘last’ message in the sense

of being both a summary of the situation and of the way it may be assessed, and a formulation

24

of what they have accomplished so far. Chiba assesses the situation as one that is a very

general feature of Mogi and to which players have even given a name (‘near miss’). He goes

on by recalling occasions when he himself was involved in such situations. Such events are

therefore common and potentially dangerous; they are characteristic of the Mogi experience.

Since they may threaten the interaction order of the Mogi community, they require careful

management, particularly when gender is a concern. Conversely, to become a proper member

of the Mogi community, one must develop an awareness of the interactional consequences of

co-proximity events and learn to make the proper moves (such as not keeping silent when

close by, so as to reassure the other player). Specific skills that deal with the management of

mediated proximity must therefore be learned, internalized and embodied.

The reformulation of the way they have managed the situation so far mentions that

Chiba has strongly advised Aki of using the cell mode of localization, which provides her

with resources to avoid unwanted proximities. Although the case at hand may be a chance

happening, nothing is sure, and because of this uncertainty, further monitoring (by the ‘we’

that Ben and Chiba now constitute in their support of Aki) is called for. This ‘we’ has also

invested itself with the larger responsibility of managing the ‘near miss’ situation properly for

the sake of all other players (because this is posited now, at this stage of their exchange, as a

very general problem of the Mogi experience). As a particular kind of conversational device,

formulations are interesting as much for what they delete or omit from previous talk as for

what they make salient (Heritage & Watson, 1979). In this case a direct reference to X’s

current location is omitted, which shows that it may be relevant enough to be monitored, but

is not so urgent that it would have to be treated immediately.

The Aki-Ben Interaction thread

25

33. Ben to Aki (23:57:41): Your hero can only take care of you until 12:00p.m. sorry

(teardrop or sweat) Aki when Chiba-san and I log out do so too ((upward pointing index))

35. Aki to Ben (00:00:32): Okay I will do what you say ((satisfied cat, twinkling))

Thank you . ((two hearts, one big one small))

The interaction thread between Aki and Ben also provides markers indicating that the

situation is stabilized. Ben responds to message 31 in which Aki has dubbed him her hero by

noting the limits of his involvement (it will not last beyond midnight, when he plans to log

out) and by urging her to do likewise when her two ‘knight-heroes’ disappear, to keep on the

safe side. Referring to future arrangements is a powerful resource to move an interaction

sequence towards closing (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). In a sense such a pre-closing move is

acknowledged and ratified by Aki in message 35, in which she agrees to do what he

recommends and thanks him for it. But it will actually take about twenty minutes and ten

messages for Aki and Ben to collaborate in the closing of their interaction thread and

eventually take leave of one another. That such closing work is accomplished jointly and in a

playful manner (it will involve at least one more joking exchange), testifies visibly to the fact

that for both of them the situation is currently under some kind of control (all the more so

because, as Ben will recall before closing, even if he leaves, Chiba will still be watching).

The Aki-Chiba Interaction thread

26

Hence, the only thread that continues after 12:30 a.m. is that between Aki and Chiba. Here we

also find strong signs that some kind of resolution has been taken. We will now consider only

two short but telling sequences in that rather long interaction thread.

37. Chiba to Aki (00:04:21): Such things happen sometimes in Tokyo … ((sweat)) I had

to be careful too especially when the other is ((face of a woman)). ((teardrop or

sweat)) regarding him I will watch him closely for some time so be reassured [Aki’s ‘real life’

first name]. ((sweat)) Ben also supports you.

39. Aki to Chiba (00:06:53): Yes ((figure with raised hands in joy, upward

curved arrow, twinkling)) I am reassured for I am supported by the two heroes on which I

may count ((kissing smiley, dash))

In the first one, Chiba tells Aki about how her predicament is common in Mogi, and recalls

how he had to behave when he was himself a party to similar occasions. This assessment of

the current situation as an instance of a general case echoes the last message he sent Ben. He

goes on, using her ‘real life’ first name, by reminding her that the situation is now properly

managed for he will monitor X, and that Ben also supports her. Aki responds to this summary

of their current involvement by stating explicitly that she is reassured (and therefore not

frightened anymore), since she is now supported by her two heroes (which shows that, sixteen

minutes after her last message of alarm, message 28, their joint action and collective

mobilization led to a proper way of managing the potential threats of the ongoing situation).

In another sequence, just a few minutes later, they even put the whole thing behind them, so

to speak.

27

47. Aki to Chiba (00:18:06): It seems it is a player who has just begun he may not come back

((kissing smiley, two sweat pictograms)) Laugh

49. Chiba to Aki (00:20:56): I hope it is the case ((upward pointing index, smiling

smiley))

50. Aki to Chiba (00:22:50): When one gets very close it’s scary ((index, teardrop or

sweat)) With Popeye-sanxix

I go to the same store ((embarrassed smiley))

Aki starts message 47 by labelling the player X a newbie, and indicating that he may

not come back. This retrospectively suggests that he is not as close now, or not visible, so that

the current situation is not as threatening (thus contributing in another way to resolving the

tension) and suggests a retrospective assessment of the ‘near miss’ ‘encounter’ as a chance

occurrence. After Chiba’s non-committal but hopeful response, Aki starts recalling another

experience of extreme proximity with another player, which made her uneasy. It links the

current situation to her previous experiences of mediated co-proximity, which proved

harmless but left her ill at ease. The allegedly threatening situation is now looked at as

something which is more in the past than in the present, and which may be linked to accounts

of similar experiences. This suggests a possible re-qualification of what just happened as

another slightly disturbing but eventually innocuous ‘near miss’ occurrence. Aki and Chiba

will indeed stop interacting after two more messages. Thus, closings coincide with a form of

closure.

28

This is the interpretation that eventually prevailed. In an interview with Aki, months

later, she recalled that there was a player with whom she had never talked before, who moved

closer and closer to her without responding to her messages (she was actually referring to the

case above). Because this frightened her she asked for help from her Mogi friends. She now

supposes that, given the nature of her surroundings, he must have been on a bike to be able to

move through the narrow streets. She is not suspicious of the intentions he might have

harboured anymore, which is consistent with the type of emergent real time closure that could

be observed in her interactions with her Mogi friends.

4. Concluding comments: ‘involvement paths’ in suspected cases of stalking

Our study provides a window on the experience of living within a location-aware community

which has lasted long enough to develop a meaningful culture of proximity. The foundation

of such an experience (and culture) is the fact that players treat their location as public. They

orient towards the fact that at any time other players may ask them to account for their

location. A direct consequence is the fact that the relative proximity of two connected players

is also a kind of public occurrence. It is visually available to the two concerned players as

well as others (other mobile players who are close enough, or PC-connected players anywhere

who might be monitoring the gameplay at the time).

Therefore, a key feature of the game is the way it affords many opportunities for the

players to ‘discover’ their proximity. Social proximities are embedded in a normative order.

For instance, it is a very general property of social interaction that the recognition and

management of ‘co-proximity events’ enact the relevance of possible face-to-face encounters

(Licoppe, 2008). However, the procedures through which such ‘co-proximity events’ are

practically managed are highly specific to the social and cultural settings in which they occur:

they interweave interaction, mobility and sociality in ways that are locally meaningful.

29

Because they project face-to-face encounters as relevant potential outcomes, co-proximity

events are also fraught with danger. That they might be threatening to the participants is both

a cause and a consequence of their social and cultural significance.

Location-aware systems that render locations visible to their users afford increased

opportunities for users to ‘discover’ original forms of mediated proximities. In the Mogi case,

a ‘co-proximity event’ becomes threatening if it is treated as an instance of ‘stalking’. Instead

of being a fortuitous occurrence, one can suspect the observable mediated proximity to be an

intended consequence of the other player’s actions. Behaviours such as getting very close to

another player and eluding any attempt to communicate by text message are open to

suspicions of stalking. It is important to note that such behaviours run counter to the

expectation that locations are public and accountable data. This is why remaining silent when

nearby makes one’s presence unaccounted for, possibly on purpose, which warrants

suspicion, and also why ‘stalking’ defined as such is a transgressive behaviour and a serious

collective issue.

This case study shows how a local proximity event experienced by two players might

be turned into a cause involving other players. As the primarily concerned player said in one

of her messages, what was at stake here was her very ability to enjoy playing Mogi and

finding pleasure in the use of its locational affordances. This was how she described both her

individual plight and a threat to the collective good on which the Mogi community of fellow

players is founded. The situation could thus be made relevant to any of them.

When ‘stalking’ is a possibility, a common response is for the suspicious player to log

out from the game altogether. But despite feeling threatened, she remains connected. The

suspected case of stalking was turned into a cause, leading to the involvement of several other

players and to the emergence of a collective action in support of the ‘threatened’ player. Such

a collective enrolment follows a relatively ordered ‘involvement path’:

30

a) The primarily concerned player describes her plight to several other players, in a

way that constantly juxtaposes on the one hand a description of the current situation as

potentially deviant (mentioning the increasing closeness of another player and his silence, i.e.

he does not send or answer text messages in which he might account for his intentions or

behaviour with respect to the ongoing co-proximity event) and, on the other, an assertion of

her emotions (she says she is scared).

b) This proves effective in eliciting responsive displays of engagement by her

recipients. They make their enrolment accountable with respect to two general, commonly

shared ‘grammars of involvement’, relevant to displays of suffering ‘at a distance’ (Boltanski,

1999): involvement based on potential indignation and claims for some kind of justice (which

involves getting the facts of the case right and repairing the situation) and involvement based

on empathy and solidarity (in which fellow members are deeply moved and invited to

empathic displays of concern and care). Significantly, the repetition of the ‘moving’ message

in which the first player described the ongoing situation and her emotional plight was

construed as a request for increased demonstrations of involvement by recipients, endowed

with summoning power. It was successful in the sense that the concerned players took some

new actions which they immediately described.

c) While the grammars governing the involvement of other players are commonly

shared and could in principle be used in any kind of problematic situation, the actions they

accomplish to demonstrate that involvement depend on the gameplay, the symbolic meanings

evolved by the location-aware society that inhabits it, the affordances the technological

system provides, and the contingencies of the situation: messages to the potentially offensive

player, monitoring the distance between the ‘dangerously’ proximate players (thus

deliberately exploiting the public character of locations), and looking for the support of other

31

players because they are more experienced or because they live close to the place where the

co-proximity event occurred.

The case study also empirically demonstrates how collective action and a distinctive

pattern of roles in the small community of involvement emerged together: the three players

eventually collaborated to posit themselves as two knight-heroes coming to the aid of a young

damsel in distress. This provided a playful narrative frame that both confirmed and made

sense of their current involvements and the cause around which they revolved: saving the

specific kind of collective good that binds the players together into a community, that is,

being able to take pleasure in the public use of location-awareness features within the Mogi

gameplay.

Potentially dangerous co-proximity events are occasions on which expectation frames

and location-specific competences are tried and collectively shaped and learned. Cases of

‘stalking’ are socially and politically crucial. The very possibility of ‘stalking’ depends on the

way locations are treated as public in the Mogi gameplay. It derives from the particular way in

which players ‘appear’ to one another, which is constitutive of the Mogi gameplay as a public

space, in Arendt’s sense. Any potential situation of ‘stalking’ is therefore a threat to the local

interaction order and may be turned into a cause publique. Although the actual procedures to

properly manage co-proximity events and cases of ‘stalking’ are likely to be specific to the

location-aware settings in which they occur, the following issues we have identified in the

Mogi case can be generalized to any location-aware collective activity for which members’

locations are actually or potentially accessible to all: a) the development of an interaction

order founded on the public character of locations; b) the development of culturally evolved

procedures to manage co-proximity events; c) the occurrence of transgressive situations which

endanger the management of mediated proximities (even though what is recognized as

‘stalking’ will probably vary from one context to another); d) the management of ‘dangerous

32

proximities’ as a social and political issue within location-aware communities, that calls for

forms of collective mobilization and action; and e) the fact that the resources to collectively

manage the dangers of proximity are tightly adjusted to the details of the same location

affordances that made co-proximity events and ‘stalking’ possible and recognizable in the

first place. Finally, we want to remark that though the details and contingencies of the

location aware systems may vary, the recognition and social management of mediated

proximities will remain a central issue in the experience of any kind of location-aware

collective, and one that opens a whole new research venue for interaction-oriented sociology

and anthropology.

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i Some were ordinary collections to complete; some were designed so that part of the

collection could only be found in certain regions (e.g. trees and flowers in their usual habitat),

which forced players to trade between themselves to complete the collections; some objects

could only be picked at a particular period of the day, etc. ii The rapidity of these connections with the game server is critical for the usability of the

game. At certain times the connection time ranged from 30 seconds to one minute, which was

experienced as a real problem by players. iii

A technical expression constructed from “Kani” which means ‘simple’ or ‘simple method’,

and « Sokui » which means ‘measuring’ or ‘calculating’ the location. iv

In all the following discussions, when we refer to the ‘names’ of the players, we mean the

names they have adopted within the game. v The term is ‘demasu’ which is a spatially-oriented expression meaning going outside.

Within this context it is used as ‘I’m logging out (of the gameplay as a shared space). vi

‘chô soba’: extremely close, surprisingly close. vii

20 minutes have passed since the previous message. One can suppose that Ben sends that

message to Aki after seeing that she has reconnected to the game. viii

She writes ‘Tadaima’ (I have now got home), a conventional formulaic expression one

utters when one arrives home (for participants who are co-present or within earshot). ix

She uses the expression ‘arigato’ with a shortened o at the end which slightly marks

familiarity. x Putting the person on his list of Mogi-friends (to which Aki already belongs) allows him to

easily monitor the distance between Aki and X. xi

Considering Chiba’s next message (Message 17), one can assume that he advised her to use

the Kanisokui mode (Cell-based GSM localization) which does not allow for her location and

direction to be set precisely. Since there was no prior message between them on the game

server logs, it is likely that they used their own mobile mail (possibly when she logged out of

the game). xii

He is referring to the suspected ‘stalker’. xiii

He might have said, I know, or OK, if he just wanted to acknowledge reception of the

information. Saying thanks followed by her name marks some form of solidarity. It is part of

the ongoing affiliative work. . xiv

The nii suffix means brother, and Chiba nii refers to Chiba as a brotherly figure. xv

“iie” is the conventional answer after thanks (meaning approximately never mind). Ben

instead uses an “un”, which marks an informal approbation between friends, or colleagues

engaged in a joint project. In this sequential position it performs affiliative work. xvi

To Chiba. xvii

Players use a Japanese transcription of the English expression ‘near miss’. xviii

He means he had to reflexively adjust his behaviour so that it might not lead to suspicions

of ‘stalking’. xix

Popeye is another player.