Playful Urban Spaces A Historical Approach to Mobile Games

Playful Urban SpacesA Historical Approach to Mobile Games

Adriana de Souza e SilvaNorth Carolina State University, USA

Larissa HjorthRMIT University, Australia

This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and hybrid-reality mobile games. It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies to show how the concept of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the trans-formation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the “phoneur”; sec-ond, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and last, the wall subculture called parkour. The authors present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play apparent within these former tropes of urbanity. With this approach, they hope to address two weaknesses in the current scholarship—namely, differentiating among a range of types of games mediated by mobile technologies and assessing the important effects of playful activities.

Keywords: cell phones; dérive; flâneur; gaming; historical approach; hybrid-reality games (HRGs); location; location-based mobile games (LBMGs); locative media; mobile games; mobile gaming; mobility; parkour; phoneur; play; playful activities; playful spaces; urban games (UGs); urban spaces; urbanity

This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and hybrid-reality mobile games (UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs, respec-

tively). It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies in order to show how the concept of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the formation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the “phoneur”; second, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and finally, the wall subculture called parkour. We suggest that the popularity of these games is not solely dependent on the developments of mobile technologies but also

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Simulation & GamingVolume XX Number X

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Authors’ Note: We would like to thank Victoria Gallagher (North Carolina State University) and Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University, Australia) for acting as reviewers of this article. Their comments and suggestions helped us improve it significantly.

Simulation Gaming OnlineFirst, published on April 26, 2009 as doi:10.1177/1046878109333723

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has roots in these earlier forms of play activities that had already transformed public spaces into playful spaces. By analyzing these activities, we show that urban spaces have always had the potential to be playful, even before the ability of navigating them via mobile technologies. We therefore analyze how these three historical tropes of urbanity construct a notion of play that comes into fruition through the develop-ment of current UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs. We claim that mobile games are built on this earlier desire to transform physical “serious” spaces into playful spaces. Like the flâneur, the practice of the dérive and the parkour, UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs, rather than taking place on the cell phone screen, use city spaces as the game board.

We also present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play present in these former tropes of urbanity. With this approach, we hope to address a gap in scholarship, which often fails to differentiate among games played with mobile technologies, ignoring their effects on the way we experience cities, mobility, and public spaces.

Urban Spaces as Playful Spaces

As mobile phones became popular, so too did “mobile gaming.” Generally, when the term mobile gaming is used, it refers to games played on the cell phone screen (Rodriguez, 2006). However, location awareness and global positioning system (GPS) devices embedded in mobiles turn them into interfaces to navigate physical spaces. By adding a digital information layer to places, mobile technologies might add value to physical spaces (Johnson, 2003). For example, some location-based services might attach “digital information” to specific places, such as the history of a building or directions to the closest mall, so that if a user with a location-aware cell phone enters the range in which the information was “attached,” he or she can access it with their device.

In the case of games, mobile phones may overlay a fictitious narrative as well as virtual game elements onto urban spaces. For example, MoGI was a HRG released in Japan in 2003, in which players needed to collect virtual objects spread throughout the city of Tokyo. With a mobile phone equipped with location awareness, a player would catch an object whenever he or she was within 400 meters from it. objects such as fruits or animals were seen on the radar on the cell phone screen depending on the player’s position in the city. Players could also interact with each other depending on their physical location. Through the game, players transformed the urban space of Tokyo into a playful and ludic space, rediscovering the city as they walked around in search of virtual objects and other players (Licoppe & Inada, 2006).

It is misleading, however, to say that MoGI simply transformed the city of Tokyo into a playful space. As it will be argued in the following section, urban spaces might be regarded as inherently playful. We use Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) concept of social spaces to support our idea of playful spaces. We also highlight some aspects of the

de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games 3

traditional definitions of play in order to bring out a few concepts as analytic tools that are helpful in our examination of games in urban spaces. Using mobile devices to navigate these spaces, thus, transforming them into game boards, only highlights how much urban spaces have already been used as playful spaces.

From a Definition of Play and Playful Spaces

our idea of playful space is derived from Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) concept of social spaces. According to Lefebvre, spaces are not given but rather constructed. We are used to think of physical/natural space and mental space as preexisting structures, disconnected from social practices. Within Lefebvre’s logic, however, our spaces reflect economic and power relations present in each historical time frame and, therefore, express social practices. As such, social spaces are social products. For Lefebvre, social spaces are composed of the triad social practices (perceived spaces), representations of space (conceived space), and representational spaces (lived spaces). Perceived spaces highlight the relationships between “daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work ‘private’ life and leisure)” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 38). Conceived spaces express a certain understanding of the place that its designers’ (such as architects and urban planners) had in mind when constructing it. We then interpret such signals when inhabiting these spaces—a sort of official coding of the space. Finally, lived spaces are described spaces, passively experienced by poets, artists, and writers. obviously, all three instances of social space (perceived, conceived, and lived) are intrinsically connected to each other and cannot be understood separately.

If we understand space as a product of social practices and as something constructed by movements of people and by the very “use” of this space, then, following Lefebvre, we might conceive spaces not only as social but also as playful, since play is an intrinsic social movement emergent by the relationships between people (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). In this sense, we suggest that playful spaces are a subcategory of social spaces in the realm of social practices (perceived spaces), in that they highlight the relationship between daily routine and urban reality. Playful spaces are mostly urban spaces and are produced by the mobility and interactions of people who inhabit these spaces.

The idea of playful spaces also challenges how play has been traditionally understood, as an activity separate from our “serious” ordinary life (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003; Caillois, 1958/2001; Huizinga, 1938/1955). We want to focus on how the concept of play is reframed when the play activity takes place in urban spaces and merges with it—when the boundaries of the “magic circle” are permeable or nonexistent. In a playful space, play ludic or “spontaneous and undirected playfulness” (McKean, 2006).


Play has been conceptualized in many different but overlapping ways. one of the earliest and most popular definitions of play comes from Johan Huizinga (1938/1955), in which he states that play is older than culture (since animals also play), but it is also central to human society. Huizinga defines play as “a free activity standing quite con-sciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (p. 13). Furthermore, play “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner” (p. 13). In this definition, Huizinga points out four components of play:

1. the creation of the so-called “magic circle,” that is, the existence of boundaries between play and ordinary life

2. a sense of total immersion in the play space3. the freedom of the activity4. the existence of some type of rules

Although Huizinga has evidently emphasized the central role of play in human culture and that the most “serious pursuits exhibit playful aspects” (Rodriguez, 2006), most game scholars to date emphasize the activity of play as separate from daily life (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80; Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971). In an attempt to summarize and standardize all definitions of play, Salen and Zimmerman (2003) propose three categories of play: game play, ludic activities, and being play-ful. Going from the more specific to the more general, we have the following:

• Game play includes play inside a game.• Ludic activities include play in less formal structures than that of a game, like play-

ing with a ball.• Being playful represents the broadest category.

In their example,

being playful while walking down the street means playing with the more rigid social, anatomical, and urban structures that determine proper walking behavior. (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 304)

It is this last concept of play as “being playful” that helps with our analysis of experiencing urban spaces as playful. However, all of the above-mentioned authors were concerned with the definition of play as it relates to games. Furthermore, they specifically framed play within the “magic circle,” that is, as an activity separate from the ordinary aspects of life, with specific boundaries of time and place. In contrast to these authors, we focus on a definition of play as casual play. More spe-cifically, we connect the concept of play to the idea of ludic. In understanding urban spaces as playful spaces, we are adding to Huizinga’s original definition in that,


1. the boundaries between play and ordinary life are blurred or challenged2. the feeling of immersion in the play space becomes an immersion in the physical

space of daily activities and even a way of rediscovering familiar urban spaces3. “freedom” is related to spontaneity—movement through space without a prior

blueprint or plan (Rodriguez, 2006)4. rules exist not as an ultimate goal but as clues for navigating spaces, as is the case

with the situationist dérive shown in the next section

UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs are by definition games, since they are, following Salen and Zimmerman (2003), systems “in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (p. 80). But what happens to urban spaces when they become the play space? How can the concept of play be understood when the playful activity ebbs in and out of the magic circle? What are the implications for “play” when the game/playful activity also includes passersby as nongame participants?

In order to understand the degree to which these emerging and yet remediated (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) forms of playful urban mobilities reframe urban spaces as playful spaces, it is important to contextualize this phenomenon through the rise of their early predecessors. The 19th century flâneur and 20th century phoneur, the Situationist International (SI) practice of the dérive, and the 21st century parkour exemplify playful uses of urban spaces both prior to and beyond the use of mobile technologies. By analyzing these forms of urban playfulness, we will see that this is the concept of play that should be considered when studying mobile games, rather than the pure definition of play within games.

From Flâneur to Phoneur: Recontextualizing Play in Urban Spaces

one method for conceptualizing the role of play in contemporary urbanity, as mirrored by all-pervasive mobile technologies, is vis-à-vis the rise and transformation of the icon of late 19th and early 20th century modernity, the flâneur. With the implementation of Baron Haussman’s vision of Paris as new boulevards graced by department stores and furnished by railways, the 1870s ushered in a new type of stroller. As both the product and icon of this new urbanity, the flâneur vividly epitomized sociologist Georg Simmel’s (1950) damning critique of bourgeois “conspicuous leisure”. The flâneur was both a symbol of bourgeoisie and the new emerging 20th century capitalism. Commonly translated as the male stroller, the flâneur wandered and consumed the city with detracted gaze. He provided another type of lens through which to read and participate in the city, exploring new angles and avenues in the shifting vignette of early postindustrial urbanity. In this new picture of modernity of which the flâneur played both the role of the distanced critic and immersed spectator, vision was central.


The flâneur symbolized the new multiple dimensions of mobility within modernity—physical, geographic, cultural, and economic mobility. By his mobility, the flâneur reterritorializes the city through a series of playful (ludic/spontaneous) actions, rescripting the city and its increasing commodification into a game of modernity in which he both participates and observes. As an index for the then-nascent rise of the urban, the flâneur was popularized by Walter Benjamin (1927/1999) in his infamous The Arcades Project as well as, to a lesser degree, by his analysis of the painter Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term.

Within the domain of play, we can characterize the flâneur—and its transformation into the phoneur—as the ludic character by excellence. Unlike the flâneur that was ordered by the visual, the phoneur is structured by the information city’s ambience, whereby modes such as haptic and aural override the dominance of visual. This reprioritizing of the senses in terms of urban spaces in the 20th and 21st centuries is made apparent through UGs and their disruptions of normalization within everyday life. UGs, as will be shown in the next section, remind us of the importance of play to understand the way in which space is politicized and normalized; indeed, by conceptualizing contemporary notions of play and mobility within the context of the flâneur, we can begin to understand the performance of urbanity. Within this context, the term ludic distances itself from the traditional definitions of play we have seen in the last section—which are mostly related to games or structured play—and closely relates to the idea of casual play as well as the act of wandering through urban spaces, activity that is personified by the flâneur. Through his wandering, the flâneur merges the “serious” space of the city (designed to promote circulation of people; include: Hannan, Sheller, & Urry, 2006) with the ludic activity of casual walk, therefore, eliminating the boundaries of a distinct and separate play space.

one hundred years on from the time of the flâneur, the spirit of modernity has dramatically transformed while still haunted by the specters of the spectacle. Although the contradictions of everyday are still palpable, the cityscape and its mediations have changed. The city, as with notions of work and leisure, has dramatically altered course, epitomized by the mobile phone’s “hyper” and “micro” coordination (Ling, 2004) of social, temporal, and spatial configurations. Mobile technologies have further embodied the contradictions inherent within everyday urbanity, becoming the conduit for the phenomenon of “full-time intimate communities” (Nakajima, Himeno, &Yoshii, 1999).

The new global cities, according to Saskia Sassen (1991), are now templates of human/dataflow interfaces. For Robert Luke (2006), these cartographies of “information networks” (Castells, 1989, p. 169) are further amplified by the role of the mobile phone to engage the user as conduit for commercial information “flows.” If the flâneur epitomized modernism and the rise of 19th century urban, then for Luke (2006), the phoneur is the extension of this tradition as the icon of postmodernity. While the world of the flâneur was orchestrated by scopophilia (the obsessive pleasure of looking), the


phoneur’s reality is mapped by “the commercial grids and communication vectors (the sociotechnical constructs of communication)” (Luke, 2006, p. 189).

As Luke continues, “an identity is mobilized as the phoneur wanders, observed while (s)talking the city streets” (p. 189), all the while being “stalked by corporate hunters” who “place the social relations of phonerie amidst flows of commodity and desire” (p. 191). Here, Luke paints a dystopian picture of the phoneur as consumer, unable to break free of a capitalist interpellation. The physical and geographic mobility of the phoneur is a misnomer—underscoring this mobility is the inability to escape surveillance and tracking. Although Luke proffers a sobering model of postmodernity in the icon of the phoneur as a vehicle for m-commerce and surveillance, it is within the realm of mobile gaming that these commercial data trails are subverted and displaced, redefining the phoneur away from the digital-citizen-as-consumer conflation Luke is suggesting and toward the magic circle of a game. Through mobile gaming, the phoneur shifts from his lineage as a 21st century version of the flâneur’s vision and distanced participation in the spectacle, and instead, he partakes in the gestures of locality.

The flâneur, as a type of hero of modernity and modernism, was very much an instrument for 20th century’s emphasis on visual cultures, whereas the phoneur’s sensory experience is arguably more prompted by the aural and the haptic. This can be witnessed with the rise in various forms of mobile gaming—from consoles such as Nintendo Wii that are mobile and haptic within the domestic sphere to UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs that are mobile and haptic in the public sphere—in which the significance of embodiment becomes central to the game play. Indeed, this is one of the main compelling reasons why mobile games provide such a variety of disruptive mechanisms for the phoneur to discover new demographies and cartographies of familiar locations. The data geo-imaginary of the city painted by Luke, through the disruptive techniques of mobile games, circumnavigates surveillance and tracking by partaking in the suspension of belief/disbelief of the game play. While the phoneur in Luke’s vision is a conduit for the normalized and increasingly surveying nature of urban spaces as 21st century informational cities, within the realm of mobile gaming, the phoneur is able to decenter the power relations through the merging of playful actions and urban spaces. For both phoneur participants and also intimate strangers that inevitably get caught up in the gameplay of UGs, the magic circle of the game automatically fades and is blurred with the order of various “flows”—geographic, electronic, sociopolitical—of the context. Thus, paradoxically, the phoneur is the transmitter of normalizations of the informational city while also being the very agent to disrupt these media and ideological flows.

Mobile games take the phoneur away from what Luke defines as “panoptic mechanisms” of mobile media, further reinforcing high capitalism and the digital-citizen-as-consumer rubric. They, thus, move the phoneur away from his part in “commercial grids and communication vectors” that Luke sees as “the reality for the phoneur.” Mobile games intervene in the maps—geographic, emotional, social, and technological—that trace the patterns of everyday life. If “at heart, the mobile


concept is about being in control—as a separate and distinct individual” (Myerson, 2001, p. 20), then UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs decenter this “control” and place the phoneur in the pushing and pulling of play. The phoneur is released from its digital-citizen-as-consumer rubric, and the city, once “territorialized within the rubric of capital and commodity flows” (Luke, 2006, p. 203), is transformed into a space of casual play. Through these games, the phoneur is no longer the conduit for these forms of capital and informational flows but is also able to disrupt the very rules and normalizations through play. It is not only in the idea of the flâneur/phoneur that the city could be experienced in a ludic way. In the middle of the 20th century, the situationists gave the flâneur a distinctive and radical twist.

The Dérive as a Drift Through Space

The SI group led by Guy Débord developed a “technique” to wander through city spaces called the dérive. According to Débord,

in a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let them-selves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. (Knabb, 1981, p. 50)

In this sense, the dérive is a way of experiencing cities distinct from the usual motives that indicate how one generally moves through urban spaces. Sheller and Urry (2006) suggest that historically, literature on transportation, that is, travel, was separate from the activities they led to, which means that people would be on the move, go from place to place, with the goal of getting somewhere. However, the space traversed was often ignored. Within this logic, urban spaces were mostly used as circulation spaces, where one keeps constantly moving around, with the goal to arrive at specific locations, but often, the space in between lacked meaning.

The dérive is an attempt to restore meaning to the spaces of circulation of the city. By using city spaces without any further purpose, the practice of the dérive “forces” participants to look at the familiar urban spaces with a different set of eyes. For example, the first dérive done in Amsterdam, used walkie-talkies to connect participants who were spread out through geographically disconnected areas of the city. Their idea was to link up parts of the city that were separated spatially. This concept is closely related to the activity of HRGs and LBMGs. Using cell phones, instead of walkie-talkies, players also “drift” through the city as a way of interacting with the game narrative and other players and, by doing that, also experience the city in unusual and new ways. In UGs, HRGs, or LBMGs, players wander through the cities without necessarily having the goal of going from place to place, or at the very least, their goal-oriented traversal is altered by game-play. It is in this mode of casual


moving through the city that these types of mobile games reenact the dérives’ playful/ludic behavior.

Most important, however, is to realize the extent to which these activities of the dérive and UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs reveal the city space’s playful character. According to Débord, the dérive is a “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,” involving “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeo-graphical effects” (Knabb, 1981, pp. 50-54). The dérive, therefore, designates certain areas as suited for ludic activities. It is in its connection to play that we find the strongest similarities between the practice of the dérive and mobile games.

Drawing from Roger Caillois’ (1958/2001) definition of play, Katie Salen and eric Zimmerman (2003) describe play as “free movement within a more rigid structure” (p. 304). Similarly, Débord views the dérive as “a combination of chance and planning, as an ‘organized spontaneity’” (Bassett, 2004, p. 401). However, unlike the surrealist experiments, and Baudelaire’s flâneur, in which chance played a strong role, the dérive was less about randomly walking through the city for its own sake and more about experiencing its contours, zones, and vortex. So the architecture of the city itself played an important role in the dérive. For example, in the algorithmic dérive, “different groups followed a simple algorithm (second right, second right, first left, repeated) to construct a path through the city, sometimes resulting in zigzag paths, sometimes spirals and loops” (Bassett, 2004, p. 403). Within this context, one might think that the dérive resembles the definition of play within games, in which play involves some set of rules and restrictions. As emphasized by Débord, however, it is the “organized spontaneity” of the dérive that connects it to the original concept of ludic. Although there are some rules, the player drifts throughout the city and never knows where the algorithmic behavior is going to take him or her, so the act of moving through space acquires relevance over the rules themselves. Similarly, in a UG, LBMG, or HRG there are rules and goals that drive the players’ movement through the city, but players might also walk randomly as they experience the urban space according to the game narrative. Moreover, the interaction with transportation flows and the architecture of the city—which construct a game space that was not created for the purpose of the game—expands and complicates the original idea of the magic circle.

Like UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs, a dérive provides a rich source of ideas for exploring and possibly understanding cities. These activities encourage players/participants to rediscover cities with which they are familiar or go to unexplored and unknown areas of the city. According to Keith Bassett (2004), “the dérive is thus a kind of elaborate game, but one that leads to a radical re-reading of the city” (p. 401).

From the definitions above, we can perceive that the dérive, besides considering the city space as a playful/ludic space, also emphasizes collective play. “one could dérive alone, but Débord thought small groups were preferable” (Bassett, 2004, p. 401). UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs are also collective experiences. Although some UGs and LBMGs might be played individually, the meaning of the gaming


experience comes from the interrelationships between players (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008).

The practice of the dérive, as a collective playful experiment that takes place in urban spaces, inherently mixes playful and everyday life “serious” spaces. Libero Andreotti (2002) points out that the dérive “radicalized Huizinga’s theory of play into a revolutionary ethics that effectively abolished any distinction between play and seriousness, or between art and everyday life” (p. 215). Likewise, UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs, in transforming urban spaces generally used for “serious” activities into playful spaces, also blur the borders between play and seriousness. More recently, the practice of the parkour appeared as another way of using city spaces in playful ways and transforming the flows of movement and mobility through the city.

Parkour: The 21st Century Flanêur

Parkour is “an urban practice of rapid on-foot movement that follows the maxim ‘keep moving forward’, with spectacular running and jumping” (Thomson, 2008, p. 251). As such, the definition of parkour is closely related to Débord’s concept of the dérive as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (Thomson, 2008, p. 253). one of the most famous parkour scenes is the opening sequence of the 007 movie Casino Royale, where a character runs away from James Bond using the city architecture as an ally.

The parkour practice experiences the city as a series of obstacles to be overcome. Traceurs, as its practitioners are called, challenge usual ways of navigating through urban spaces, tracing routes through which no ordinary person would dare to go. For example, a traceur jumps across buildings, climbs on walls, and sees every single piece of architecture as objects to help construct or facilitate their trajectory. Although UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs do not necessarily require players to challenge the city architecture, they include the preexisting architecture of the city into the game play and challenge the concept of the magic circle. These games encourage players to discover unknown areas of the city.

Thus, by experiencing the city as an unknown space, players also reterritorialize the cityscape with new meanings and experiences (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Furthermore, the traceur completely uses urban spaces as playful spaces when he or she moves around the architecture of the city with the only goal of traversing the spaces, rather than getting somewhere. Her pleasure stands in challenging the space, creating new ways of moving through it. Within this context, the traceur might be viewed as the 21st century flâneur, but instead of following the city boulevards, she challenges the cityscape.

Like the flâneur/phoneur continuum, the practice of the dérive and the parkour, UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs use city spaces as playful spaces. Although all these types of games have the characteristics of taking advantage of the player’s mobility


through physical space by using a mobile device as the game interface, they also have some distinguishing features among themselves. The following section highlights these differences, in order to provide a general overview of the key types of UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs to date and how they bring into fruition these early modes of using the city space in playful ways.

A Classification of Mobile Games

Urban Games

By using the urban setting as the canvas for the playful activity, UGs arrest, subvert, and transform modes of mobility and immobility within the everyday; in other words, urban gaming allows players to rediscover the particular weave of social fabric that constitutes play. With the rise of so many divergent forms of mobile gaming, the term itself has come under much debate. For this purpose, we define UGs as games that use the city space as the game board. UGs are often multiplayer games played out in the streets of the city. examples include B.U.G. (United States), Proboscis’ URBAN TAPeSTRIeS (United Kingdom), and INP URBAN VIBe (South Korea).

As Frank Lantz (2006) notes, “Big Games” are “large-scale, real-world games that occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness, complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-face social interaction” (Lantz, 2006). Lantz emphasizes the importance of these projects in testing the notion of reality as mediation.

Big games highlight the ways in which games can reflect and challenge social norms, reminiscent of political movements such as SI in the 1960s and the more recent phenomenon of the parkour. Indeed, the ability of “Big Games” to interrupt the normalcies of the everyday by allowing participants to transcend their role of citizens-as-consumers is detailed through Luke’s conceptualization of the phoneur. Games like BIG URBAN GAMe (B.U.G.), SHooT Me IF YoU CAN, CoNQWeST, and NoDeRUNNeR exemplify this tendency.

BIG URBAN GAME (B.U.G.) (St. Paul and Minneapolis, 2003). BIG URBAN GAMe (B.U.G.) consisted of a 5-day event occurring across the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul in 2003 (Lantz, 2006); 200 square miles becomes the canvas for a spectacle that transforms the everyday into a site of unfamiliarity and the sublime. Three teams raced conspicuous 25-foot-tall red, yellow, and blue inflatable game pieces through the cities orchestrated by public decisions registered on the B.U.G. Web site. The aim of B.U.G. is for teams to visit all the sites in the quickest time. It is up to the players to decide how they will move from site to site and, therefore, achieve the game’s goal. As a game that deploys different notions of embodiment, scale, and context, B.U.G. brings together the flâneur’s wandering of the city with


the dérive intervention into everyday life. Rather than the flâneur wandering, observ-ing the spectacle of modernity, in B.U.G, players become part of the spectacle. The spectacle of the big inflatable game piece is impossible to avoid, disrupting normal movements wherever it goes. People stop and stare. Streets full of movement become still. Players become the game’s parts, engulfed by the magnitude of the nodes. Play takes on then a new relationship to the players as teams grapple with the reterritorial-ized cityscape. Spectacle marries gesture in B.U.G.; the canvas of the urban becomes a colorful site for the extraordinary. This game rehearses Débord’s dérive in which the spectacle of the everyday is disrupted by another spectacle that dislocates nor-malcy and everyday order.

SHOOT ME IF YOU CAN (Seoul, 2005). orchestrated through the South Korean new media center, Nabi, URBAN VIBe presented a variety of games that drew from earlier board games such as chess. one particular project, a chasing game involving camera phones and MMSing called SHooT Me IF YoU CAN, consisted of two teams pitted against each other, in which the aim was to “shoot” all the opposing team mem-bers without being shot yourself. Rather than guns, it was the lens of the camera phone that shot by taking pictures, which were then sent back to the master. SHooT Me IF YoU CAN consisted of members running around a busy shopping district of Seoul, Myeong-Dong. The result is a game in which immediacy and delay are part of the experience, with unexpected moments like “waiting for immediacy” becoming the poetics of delay. That is, the role of frustration surrounding technological lag and desires of instantaneity has often been discussed in terms of the game play of UGs (Hjorth, 2008).

CONQWEST (United States, 2004). In CoNQWeST, a game conducted in several U.S. cities in 2004, the classic treasure hunt becomes a series of nodes in the form of semacodes (Lantz, 2006; Svahn, 2005). Semacodes look similar to barcodes and work in unison with the camera phone; that is, when the player takes a picture of the sema-code with their phone, it directly connects to a specific Web site online. The urban space is filled with a series of semacodes, and teams navigate their way around the city in order to find these semacodes and “take possession” of areas of the city. each sema-code has a dollar value and the first team to accrue 5,000.00 dollars worth of treasure wins the game. Five teams race through the city in the hope that they will win the first prize—winners get the equivalent amount of value in scholarship funds as their win-ning amount ($4,000 codes equates to $4,000 in scholarship funds for their school). each team is conspicuously identified by the fact that they carry giant inflatable mas-cots. one must ask—is this just a newer form of fund-raising? Indeed, one could see such games as rehearsing Luke’s notion of the phoneur as a “digital-citizen-as- consumer”; however, such an approach neglects the fact that the game is about team work and collaboration—two notions very much eroded by the rhetoric of the infor-mational city as a spectacle of digital-citizens-as-consumers.


NODERUNNER (New York, 2003). Another example of a UG that deploys the paradoxes of online mobile technologies within the mapping of the cityscape is NoDeRUNNeR, by Yury Gitman and Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena. It was devised for an exhibition called “We Love NY: Mapping Manhattan with Artists and Activists,” organized by new media art organization eyebeam (Galloway, 2005). The aim of the UG was to transform notions of what constitutes public art—rather than the permanent sculptures people would associate with public art, NoDeRUNNeR presented the ephemeral and contingent.

In NoDeRUNNeR, the cityscape of Manhattan is reterritorialized into hot and cold spots—determined by access to the Internet. The aim of the game, in which two teams are pitted against each other, is to access and document (via camera phones) as many of the wireless Internet nodes as possible while attempting to get from Bryant Park in midtown to Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. Teams are given a WiFi-enabled laptop, a digital camera, taxi fare, and 2 hours. Points are obtained by taking camera phone pictures of themselves in the exact spot at which they connected to the wireless Internet; they are also awarded points for using scanning software to find the nodes on their journey. NoDeRUNNeR highlights the various cartographies of Manhattan—geographic and technological.

As these four games show us, UGs have the ability to transform normalizations of urban spaces into sites for collaborative and politicized play. They show how we can intervene in the regulation of everyday practices and show that UGs function very much like an extension of dérive practices—disrupting, dislocating, and disordering the urban space. This allows phoneurs to become politicized, no longer sublimated by digital-citizen-as-consumer interpellations. UGs demonstrate that within the rise of urban modernity, the flâneur still plays a pivotal role in informing and transforming the geoimaginary space of the urban. In sum, UGs transform the everyday cityscape into a playing field by deploying various forms of new and old tactics and media. They bring new insight into the burgeoning urban and human geography studies, teaching us much about the layers of information and data constituting a city today.

Location-Based Mobile Games

LBMGs are games played with cell phones equipped with location awareness (via triangulation of waves or GPS) and Internet connection. Like UGs, LBMGs use the city space as the game environment. However, they additionally allow the linking of information to places, and players to each other via location awareness. Although LBMGs might have an online component, the game takes place primarily in the physical space and on the cell phone screen, as players can see each other and/or virtual game elements on their mobile screen. BoTFIGTHeRS, GeoCACHING, CITITAG, and ALIeN ReVoLT exemplify this trend.


BOTFIGHTERS (Stockholm, 2001-2005). Building on the former experience of the dérive, BoTFIGHTeRS players communicated via text messages (instead of walkie-talkies) and would drift through the city in search of other players. Also, like the dérive, the game players experienced the city through the eyes of a tourist and found new unfa-miliar places in the cityscape. BoTFIGHTeRS was the world’s first multiuser LBMG. Created by Swedish company It’s Alive in 2001, the game’s goal was to virtually shoot other players in the vicinity using short message service (SMS). In order to play, one had to create an avatar (a robot) on the game’s Web site, which could be armed with guns and shields. The avatar was then “downloaded” to the player’s cell phone.

once on the streets, players received text messages, such as “bot x nearby,” whenever another player was in the vicinity. A player could also search for another bot, sending a text message to the game server like “search for bot y.” Shooting in the game was also done via text messages. The accuracy of the shot depended on the physical distance between players as well as on the type of gun in the player’s possession. For example, a fairly accurate shot could be done within 200 meters. However, if the player were a sniper, the shot could hit almost a mile away (de Souza e Silva, 2008a; Sotamaa, 2002).

A second version of BoTFIGHTeRS released in 2005 deployed Java-enabled phones. In this version, players could see each other on their screen radar, which displayed their physical positions in relation to each other. even though one could decide to turn the cell phone off or to temporarily be unavailable for searching and shooting, the game was always running in the background. That is what made BoTFIGHTeRS a pervasive game. BoTFIGHTeRS was popular between 2001 and 2005 in countries such as Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

GEOCACHING (2001). GeoCACHING is also one of the first available LBMGs. However, different from BoTFIGHTeRS, the game is not necessarily multiplayer. It is also not played with a cell phone; it uses GPS devices as the game interface. The goal of the game is to find hidden caches in bizarre and inaccessible places. In order to play, the first step is to go to the game Web site and find where caches are located. Caches can be found in more than 180 countries. The Web site has each cache’s coordinates, which the player must download to the GPS device in order to find the hidden object’s location.

each cache is classified according to a type and two numbers that range from 1 to 5; the first number indicates how difficult it is to find the cache, and the second one shows how tough the terrain is surrounding the cache. Number 1 means easy; number 5 means hard. The traditional cache consists of a container and at least a logbook inside it. After finding the cache, the player must sign the logbook and report that she found the cache to the player who hid it. The note is then posted to the Web site. If, besides the logbook, there is also any object inside the box, the discoverer is allowed to take it, as long as she leaves another object in the box. The


rule is, “If you take something, leave something in return.” Anybody who can search for a cache can also post one. As the game developed, users’ involvement increased, with them creating and contributing new types of caches.

Mobile technologies have a strong relationship to physical spaces, and in the case of GeoCACHING, this is enacted via the use of GPS devices to map territories and find “treasures,” transforming the physical environment into an unexplored territory. The transformation of the game/physical space into this unmapped territory is exactly where the playful element of GeoCACHING relates to the earlier activities of the dérive and the parkour. Although Geocachers, unlike the flâneur, have a specific goal in their movement through space (finding a cache), they need to explore the game space (like in the dérive) to play the game. It is this exploration that embeds a playful meaning to the game space, since the player moves around, going to places to where he or she generally would not go.

CITITAG (Bristol, U.K., 2004). The deployment of various forms of mobility and immobility to create play is also the outcome of the LBMG CITITAG. organized by the open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in Bristol, U.K., in 2004, CITITAG has been described as a wireless location-based multiplayer game, designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences (Vogiazou, Raijmakers, Geelhoed, Reid, & eisenstadt, 2006). Luke’s phoneur is released from its citizen-as-consumer rubric and into the spontaneity of a reworked “playground tag” through a coordination between online and offline activity. Like all these LBMGs, the cityscape becomes the playground in which both players and passersby become embroiled in new experiences. In CITITAG, the schoolyard “tag” is extended by players equipped with a GPS-WiFi-enabled iPAQ Pocket PC searching out opposing team members to tag. While reading the Pocket PC, players need to negotiate the difference between enemies on screen and offline. If a player gets tagged, they need a friend to set them free. Sometimes innocent bystanders get tagged because they look like they are in the offline position corresponding with the online coordinates; the notion of intimate strangers is thereby further tested.

ALIEN REVOLT (Rio de Janeiro, 2005-2007). Following much of BoTFIGHTeRS’ tradition, ALIeN ReVoLT was the first LBMG commercially launched in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in May 2005. The game was the result of a combined effort among the company M1ND Corporation, who gathered the development team together: the Brazilian operator oi, who provided the cell phone service; the engineers of the German company Siemens in Brazil, who developed the algorithms for the first mobile location-aware platform in the country; and Nokia, who opened the applica-tion programming interface for its Series 60 mobile phones for the game develop-ment (de Souza e Silva, 2008b).

After learning about BoTFIGHTeRS, ALIeN ReVoLT’s developers decided to go beyond the idea of the first-person shooter and create a complete role-playing


game. Moreover, instead of starting with the basic SMS technology, M1ND Cor-poration developed the first version of the game for the Nokia S60 java mobile phones, which allow players to create their characters on the cell phones, instead of having to go to the game Web site. everything is done using the mobile platform.

ALIeN ReVoLT tells the story of a group of alien creatures who try to take over the earth. Players can decide to join the human forces or the alien army and choose between three classes of characters—Magus, Hacker, or Warrior—each of which has different attributes and abilities. The closer the opponent, the larger the character that appears on the screen. Like in BoTFIGHTeRS, shots are more accurate at a close range. Players can then invite each other for a duel by positioning the aim on the target and pressing “5” to attack. If targeted, a player has the option to use a blackout mode in order to become invisible in the enemy’s radar, which gives her three seconds to shoot back while hidden.

Finally, if there is no other real player around, it is possible to fight against nonplayable characters, which are virtual creatures displayed on the radar by the server. Nonplayable characters have a real position in physical space, and every time a player logs in, she is able to see four of them. These virtual creatures, besides being a good source of weapons and armors once killed, also fill in empty players’ areas in the game. ALIeN ReVoLT uses the city as a playful space by creating a fictive narrative and superimposing it on the architecture of the city.

ALIeN ReVoLT’s players say that they generally play the game on the way to school or to work, so much of the game play actually happens inside buses (de Souza e Silva, 2008b). As we mentioned earlier, buses as part of the urban public transportation system is embedded in a city dynamics of circulation spaces, moving people around from point to point (include: Hannan, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). A game like ALIeN ReVoLT, however, creates opportunities for people to use this in-between space in meaningful ways—for example, to play a game. Just like the practices of the dérive and the parkour, playing a LBMG causes people to reterritorialize circulation spaces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They do so by using these spaces in a playful way. In the case of ALIeN ReVoLT, it is not that the player drifts without a goal, but rather, the game itself may access the player in unexpected ways, such as when another player pops onto the cell phone radar. The playfulness then becomes spontaneous and undirected as well.

LBMGs are similar to UGs in that they use the city space as the game board. However, the use of a GPS cell phone as the game interface transforms it into a location-based game. By using a location-aware interface, LBMGs not only attach information to physical spaces but also allow players to see each other’s position in real space. Like UGs, LBMGs reflect the practices of the dérive and the parkour by creating what we called ludic play—that is, frequently players navigate the city in unusual and unexpected ways as a consequence of the game narrative/players. This movement through the city might be goal driven—that is, when a player goes out


specifically to play the game—but it is generally spontaneous—by moving through the city in their usual routes to school or work, players are accessed by the game—a fact that turns their experience of the city into an unexpected playful adventure. Furthermore, like the dérive, LBMGs are social experiences, and the coordination with other players becomes critical for the creating of the play activity. HRGs, in turn, create a hybrid game space, which is shared simultaneously in physical and digital spaces.

Hybrid Reality Games

Much of the innovative research on mobile gaming has been conducted around hybrid reality gaming (Davis, 2005; de Souza e Silva, 2004, 2006; Licoppe & Guillot, 2006; Licoppe & Inada, 2006) that aims to challenge the role of copresence in every-day life—forging questions around boundaries between digital and physical spaces. HRGs are played with cell phones equipped with Internet connection and location awareness. Like UGs, they transform the city into the game canvas, and like in LBMGs, players interact with each other depending on their relative position in physical space. Additionally, HRGs have an online component, represented as a 3D virtual world, so they take place simultaneously in physical and digital spaces. It is the shared game experience among multiple users that creates the hybrid reality. HRGs have three main characteristics (de Souza e Silva, 2008a):

1. They are mobile, that is, the use of mobile technologies as interfaces require play-ers to be actually moving through physical spaces in order to play the game.

2. They are multiuser, that is, the doubled play space requires more than one player.3. They define a new gaming spatial logic, since the game takes place simultaneously

in physical and digital spaces.

HRGs like CAN YoU See Me NoW?, UNCLe RoY ALL ARoUND YoU, PACMANHATTAN, and MoGI need players in both spaces in order to be played.

CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? (London, Tokyo, Barcelona, etc., 2001-2004). In CAN YoU See Me NoW?, the street players’ mission is to chase online players. Street play-ers run on the streets equipped with a GPS device, a walkie-talkie, and a handheld com-puter, which shows a 2D map of the city and the position of online players. online players are at remote computer terminals and can “walk” through a 3D representation of the same city in which they can see their own avatar as well as the position/avatar of the street players. Both types of players, although occupying differentiated spaces (physical city space and digital 3D modeled city), can meet in the same hybrid space created by the game, which includes both physical and digital spaces simultaneously (Flintham et al., 2003). CAN YoU See Me NoW? was the first HRG, created in 2001 by the British group Blast Theory and The University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab.

In mixing both digital and physical spaces, HRGs create a different experience of play. We have been attesting so far that urban spaces have been playful spaces even


before the advent of the mobile phone. After the popularity of video and computer games, digital spaces have become one of the most popular play spaces. HRGs merge urban and digital spaces to create an interconnected playful space. The traditional concept of play as defined by the magic circle, which had been already challenged with the expansion of game spaces to urban spaces, as in the case of UGs and LBMGs, is further called into question with HRGs, where a virtual 3D world is overlapped and interconnected with the existing urban space. Generally, this 3D world represents the physical urban space, creating a doubled sense of place, in which the playful space becomes permeable and is without definite boundaries.

UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU (London, 2003). In HRGs, actions in digital space have direct implications on the physical city and vice versa. For example, in UNCLe RoY ALL ARoUND YoU, another collaboration between Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab, online players might collaborate with street players in order to help them find Uncle Roy’s office, which is a real location in the city (Benford et al., 2004). online players inhabit a 3D map of the city where they can see the positions of street players. on the other hand, street players walk around the city and are able to see the online players’ avatars on a map on their personal digital assistants that represents the city. By inhabiting a digital environment, online players have access to postcards of the city containing specific information that might help street players. online players, however, cannot walk in the city and physically find Uncle Roy’s office. Therefore, to accomplish the game’s mission, both players must work together by sharing information that is place specific.

Another interesting fact about HRGs (and also about UGs and LBMGs) is the implications of passers-by. For example, while playing UNCLe RoY, frequently, players need to ask for information to people on the streets, who are technically not part of the game but somehow become plugged into this new game space. This is another example of how HRGs further challenge the traditional definition of play as separate activity with clear boundaries between playful and ordinary life. A regular person can be walking their usual path from home to work and suddenly find himself or herself participating in a HRG if asked for information by a player.

Additionally, although UNCLe RoY has a time limit—and, therefore, one might win or loose the game in case he or she doesn’t find Uncle Roy’s office—the play experience is much looser than in a regular game. It is actually constructed from the relationships built with other players (online and on the streets) during the course of the game and through the navigation/exploration of the city space in order to find an unknown fictitious place (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). In this sense, the playful experience in UNCLe RoY—and other HRGs—is much closer to the play we find with the dérive, the parkour, and the flanêur rather than in traditional game play.

I LIKE FRANK (Adelaide, 2004). Another collaboration between Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab, I LIKe FRANK, was played in 2004 in the city of Adelaide,


Australia, and in a digital environment that mimicked the same city. In order to play, participants had to register with Blast Theory for a 60-minute experience as street players. The game included street players as well as online players. Street players used a mobile phone as the interface to play the game and to navigate the physical cityscape of Adelaide through a 2D onscreen map. online players could play from anywhere in the world using a home computer, Internet connection, and Web interface to navigate a digital 3D model of Adelaide. online players could see the position of street players in the 3D world and communicate with them via text messages. The goal of the game for both types of players was to find Frank (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008).

Although Frank was a fictional character, his office had a specific location in the city, which was revealed to online players in the 3D world in the form of postcards. The street player did not have access to the online information but was able to move through the city. The street player thus needed to trust an online player and ask for information in order to find Frank’s location. Having access to different types of information and different play skills, both online players and street players need to collaborate to complete the game and, through the game dynamics, gain a different perspective on the urban space of Adelaide.

PACMANHATTAN (New York, 2004). Another HRG to deploy color with spec-tacle and gesture is PACMANHATTAN. Indeed, taking the retropower of Pac Man outside his normal virtual world and placing him in a real-world context was bound to create fun and interest (Lantz, 2006). As the title suggests, PACMANHATTAN consisted of Pac Man game play within the actual streets of Manhattan—a person dressed as Pac Man (wearing yellow) tried to avoid being “eaten” by other people dressed in various primary colors and simultaneously eat the virtual dots on the streets. In a remote location, players in a control room in constant contact with street players via cell phones update the street player’s physical position on a digital map of the city. The only way for the street players to know which dots have already been eaten is by talking to his or her controller. The necessary interaction between street and online players makes PACMANHATTAN a HRG.

Here, we see the meeting of the flâneur with the tactics of the parkour or, in other words, the phoneur partaking in the dérive. As in the Amsterdam dérive, participants coordinated via walkie-talkies what would then become spontaneous playful movement through the city. As in the dérive, players have no predefined route, but their course is determined by the position of other players and by real-time instructions received from players who can see their position on a virtual map of Manhattan on a remote computer screen. The play activity thus emerges from the unexpected interactions among players—local and remote—and among players and play space.

MOGI (Tokyo, 2003-2007). MoGI was the first commercial HRG. It was released in Japan and developed by NewtGames from 2003 to 2006. The game was played


with cell phones equipped with GPS or cellular positioning. It used the player’s relative position in physical space to construct a game space that overlaid the city of Tokyo. MoGI’s goal was to collect virtual creatures and objects spread out in the city with the cell phone in order to form a collection.

Virtual objects and creatures had specific locations and habits and could be collected whenever a player was 400 meters from them. Additionally, in order to complete their collections, players were encouraged to exchange objects with each other. on their cell phone screen radar, players saw a map of the region where they were, including not only virtual creatures and objects but also other players signed in to the game. Players could then exchange messages with each other. Finally, online players logged into the game had a bird’s-eye view of the game location, with the relative position of all players (Licoppe & Guillot, 2006; Licoppe & Inada, 2006).

As of August 2004, MoGI had about 1,000 active users1 in Japan, who paid 210 Japanese yen (1.8 dollars) a month. In 1 year, MoGI had over 40,000 logins, 70,000 objects picked up, and 70,000 messages sent. Although users generally logged in all day long and on all days of the week, the hunt time generally occurred during the day, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., while the mail and trade peak occurred after 8 p.m. MoGI is a HRG because, besides using the city as the game board and employing cell phones equipped with location awareness as the game interface, the game action occurs simultaneously in physical and digital spaces representing the city of Tokyo. For example, when online players guide street players to find objects and creatures in the city space, they can see a view of the city that is hidden for street players. By sharing information and collaborating with each other, they construct this hybrid space.

especially after 2003, UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs became more popular. Rather than providing an exhaustive list of all the current games on offer, the above list has attempted to identify some of the most innovative experiences in this gaming genre, relating them to previous urban experiences of the flâneur/phoneur, derive, and parkour. A more descriptive correlation among these games can be found in the appendix.

Conclusions

The significance of games to teach us about place, cultural practice, and play is clearly demonstrated by contemporary mobile games. Rather than video and computer games that have, up until recently, neglected the importance of physical geographic spaces, UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs remind us of the pivotal role games play in understanding phenomena around embodiment/disembodiment and mobility/immobility. As mobility becomes not only a key indicator of material practices but also symbolic of postindustrial urbanity, mobile games can provide much insight. Furthermore, by using urban spaces as the game board, these games also challenge traditional definitions of play and force us to look at city spaces as playful spaces. one


way to conceptualize this phenomenon is through three historical tropes for urbanity: the shift from the flâneur to the phoneur, the tactic of the dérive, and the wall subculture called parkour. While the rise of mobile technologies has enabled mobile gaming to expand, we have argued that the rise of mobile gaming has not been solely dependent upon that development; rather, mobile gaming, like mobility and play, has a long history in earlier play activities that already transformed public spaces into playful spaces.

Urban Games

Location-Based Mobile Games

Hybrid Reality Games

2001 THe Go GAMe (United States)

BoTFIGHTeRS (Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow, Dublin), Geocaching

CAN YoU See Me NoW? (Sheffield, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Barcelona, etc.)

20022003 BIG URBAN GAMe

(St. Paul, Minneapolis), NoDeRUNNeR (New York)

UNCLe RoY ALL ARoUND YoU (London), MoGI (Tokyo)

2004 CoNQWeST (Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Phoenix)

CITITAG (Bristol), SAVANNAH (Bristol)

I LIKe FRANK (Adelaide)

2005 SHooT Me IF YoU CAN (Seoul)

ALIeN ReVoLT (Rio de Janeiro)

FReQUeNCY 1550 (Amsterdam)

2006 SCooT (Australia)2007

RIDeR SPoKe (London)

Note:This table is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather, it lists some of the most popular UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs to date.

Appendix

Note

1. The active MoGI user logs in at least once a month.

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Adriana de Souza e Silva is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and the director of the Mobile Gaming Research Lab (http://mglab.chass.ncsu.edu). She is also a faculty member of the Science, Technology and Society Program at NCSU and co-author of the book Digital Cityscapes: Merging digital and urban playspaces, by Peter Lang (2009). In 2004/2005, she was a senior researcher at the UCLA Graduate School of education and Information Studies (GSe&IS) at CReSST (Center for the Study of evaluation). Adriana holds a PhD in communication and culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. From 2001 to 2004 she was a visiting scholar at the UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts. Her research focuses on how new media (mobile) interfaces change our relationship to space and create new social environments via media art and hybrid reality games. She obtained a master’s degree in communication and image technology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Contact: NCSU Dept of Communication, 201 Winston Hall, Campus Box 8104, Raleigh, NC 27695-8104, USA; +1 919-515-9736 (t); +1 919-515-9456 (f); [email protected].

Larissa Hjorth is researcher, artist, and senior lecturer in the Games and Digital Art Programs at RMIT University, Australia. From 2009, Hjorth will be an Australian Research Council APD fellow conducting


a 3-year cross-cultural case study of online communities in six locations (Manila, Singapore, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Melbourne) in the region (with Michael Arnold). Since 2000, Hjorth has been research-ing and publishing on gendered customizing of mobile communication, gaming, and virtual communities in the Asia-Pacific, which is outlined in her book Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (London, Routledge). Hjorth has published widely on the topic in journals such as Convergence, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Continuum, ACCESS, Fibreculture, and Southern Review. In 2007, she co-convened the International Mobile Media conference with Gerard Goggin (www.mobilemedia2007.net) and the Interactive Entertainment (Ie) conference with esther Milne (www.ie.rmit.edu.au). She is currently writ-ing an undergraduate textbook on gaming as new media for Berg (series editors Leslie Haddon and Nicola Green) and has just finished editing two Routledge anthologies—Games of Locality: Gaming Cultures in the Asia-Pacific (with Dean Chan) and Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunication to Media (with Gerard Goggin). Larissa is a regularly invited speaker at international conferences on mobile media, Asia-Pacific popular culture, new media, and ICTs. Contact: C/o School of Creative Media, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3000; [email protected].

Playful Urban Spaces A Historical Approach to Mobile Games

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