Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media

L. Hjorth, I. Richardson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137301413
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301420
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on case studies across the Asia-Pacific region, Gaming in Social, Locative and Mobile Media explores the 'playful turn' in contemporary everyday life, and the role of mobile devices, games and social media in this transformation.

1

Introduction

Social, Locative, and Mobile Media Gaming

In Seoul, a young female office worker uses the social mobile media platform app KakaoTalk to play I Love Coffee with her friends working in other offices. In Singapore, a teenage girl waiting for friends in a café takes a picture with her iPhone and uploads it to her account on the location-based mobile website Foursquare, to show her late friends she has already arrived. In Tokyo, a young male commuting to work plays Subway Surfers: Tokyo on his Samsung Galaxy while intermittently checking emails and Twitter feeds. In Sydney, a teenage boy on his way to school checks his World of Warcraft (WoW) guild stats and successfully bids for a recently posted item in one of the auction houses using the WoW Mobile Armory app. In Melbourne, a mother switches her iPhone to Airplane Mode and opens her toddler’s favourite puzzle game Tozzle so he can play (and stay put) while they wait in line at the supermarket. Over in Shanghai, a university student and her mother keep in regular online contact by playing Happy Farm together.

This opening vignette paints a picture of how mobile games are becoming seamlessly incorporated into the day-to-day activities of people across diverse cultures and contexts. In tandem with rapid developments in smartphone capabilities and cloud technology, the increasing sophistication and integration of both location-based services (LBSs) and social network services (SNSs), and the exponential growth of app-based media ecologies, the mobile media interface has emerged as a complex gaming platform in its own right. By 2013 the games industry is estimated to be worth $70 billion globally (PWC 2013), with the rise of smartphones, pads and tablets, mobile games and playful apps comprising the fastest-growing market share, estimated to reach over $9 billion in 2013 (Johnston 2013), with some predicting that the mobile device will become the ‘primary screen’ for games by 2016 (Peterson 2013). Within this dynamic and evolving mediascape, what constitutes gaming—and ‘play’ more generally—is undergoing significant transformation. Across a range of devices, offline and online contexts, levels of engagement, and modes of presence, games and ‘playful’ mobile media activities are being enacted by a growing and diverse demographic, irrespective of age, gender, place, and cultural milieu.

As such playfulness pervades the everyday mobile media practices of millions of people around the world—many who would not, importantly, consider themselves ‘gamers’—it is clear that distinctions between types of gamers (e.g. ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’) and their corresponding modes of gameplay are no longer adequate to the task of understanding and interpreting contemporary experience. Indeed, as ‘casual’ mobile gaming becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life—part of what Jesper Juul (2009) defines as a ‘casual revolution’—the term ‘casual’ becomes a reductive misnomer for a broad and unruly spectrum of gameplay, camouflaging much of the financial, temporal, creative, and social investment made by those who play (Taylor 2012).

Gaming in Social, Locative, and Mobile Media offers a critical and ethnographically informed response to key questions surrounding the constitution of mobile gaming as it permeates the complex practices and relationships that comprise contemporary life. How do we theorise the various modes of intimate and co-present play enabled by mobile media? What impact do these practices have on how we experience play, sociality, and mobility? Given that place has always been central to mobile media use, how does the convergence between locative, social, and mobile media gaming invoke new types of localised techno-social effects? To effectively explore these questions we have structured the book thematically around three key aspects of gaming today—mobile, locative, and social—so as to effectively explore the separate yet convergent histories of social media, locative media, and mobile media, and how gaming practices have emerged and evolved from these histories. In this introduction we reflect upon these three media rubrics—the social, locative, and mobile—by providing an outline of the themes and concepts that will be explored in detail throughout the book.

Although we are considering the different historical trajectories of ‘casual’ mobile games, location-based games, and social media games, we would stress that the distinction is thematic, a heuristic strategy enabling us to unpack the way these trajectories overlap in different ways depending on cultural contexts and habitudes. In contemporary game practice, we would more commonly experience a variable intersection of these features; even the most ‘occasional’ and solitary of mobile games—such as the word game QatQi—includes a live leader-board that compares player rankings by suburb, region, country, and world, thus integrating in minimalist fashion both social and locative aspects. Indeed, the wide variation in modalities of mobile gameplay is in part determined by the ‘dimensionality’ of the game (depth of story-world, requisite skillset, etc.), and the level of commitment and investment required, but it is also an effect of the way location-based and social networking functionalities are more or less integrated into the gameplay, and the extent to which these are taken up by a player.

Thus, for example, the playful locative media service Foursquare (with a purported 30 million users) combines Global Positioning System (GPS) functionality, location tracking, navigational maps, and user-generated first-hand recommendations of ‘the best places to go’ (a palimpsest of personal mini-narratives of place) that can also intersect with friend networks and consumer rewards. While Foursquare is a mode of situational play (dependent on one’s location and intention in real time), social networking and messaging services such as Facebook provide distribution platforms for social media games like Farmville and Words With Friends, which users can play as a means of connecting with friends regardless of their location or situation.

Throughout Gaming in Social, Locative, and Mobile Media we draw upon case studies across the Asia-Pacific region, examining how the specific contexts of casual, mobile, social, and location-based play are giving rise to new gaming genres, media ecologies, emergent communities, and types of social labour. We consider the activity of discrete casual mobile gaming in urban spaces across different cultures, and the manner in which this enacts a kind of antisocial ‘cocooning’ and self-contained mode of being-in-public. We also look to older experimental hybrid reality, geosocial, and urban mobile games, in the light of contemporary experiences of location-based networking services such as Foursquare, Jiepang, and Geocaching, and in terms of the shifting boundaries of privacy, place, and sociality. Through the lens of social, locative, and mobile media games, Gaming in Social, Locative, and Mobile Media thus reflects upon the ways in which play, mobility, and place are becoming entwined in complex new ways. But first, an exploration of the three themes, followed by an outline of the book’s structure and content.

Seriously casual: Reframing the mobile in gaming

Given that games converge and blur platforms, media forms and practices, contexts, and modes of engagement, it is not surprising that this boundary erosion is reflected in the debates and different schools of thought within game studies. While this book does not directly address how mobile gaming might be properly placed within the nascent discipline of game studies, as researchers within the fields of cultural studies and mobile media, we aim to bring into focus interdisciplinary perspectives—including those within game scholarship—around the complex merger of mobile media and gaming. For example, as Richardson (2012) notes in her study of touchscreen (haptic) mobile phone gaming, mobile gameplay is unique in that it creates a particular relationship to the body that is based on interruptibility (i.e. manoeuvring between gameplay, calls, messaging, and the demands of one’s physical environment) and on shifting modalities of place, presence, and being-in-the-world. That is, gaming on a multifunctional media and communication device must at times be deliberately open to distraction. This calls into question terms like ‘video game’, ‘avatar’, ‘immersion’, and the ‘magic circle’, which demarcate gameplay from broader social and non-game contexts, suggesting that we need alternative tropes with which to describe our mobile game experiences.

We also question the ongoing conflation of casual and mobile gaming. As T. L. Taylor (2012) notes in her study of the professionalisation of gamers as part of broader commodifications of lifestyle, the somewhat pejorative term ‘casual’ often disguises the substantial investments made by some casual gamers and oversimplifies an increasingly diverse and rapidly developing medium of gameplay. The term ‘casual gaming’, like mobile gaming, designates a range of activities and practices both inside and outside the home. Ironically, despite the potential physical and network mobility afforded by mobile devices, studies show that mobile games are more often than not played in the bedroom (Chan 2008). In other words, while the domestic increasingly becomes unbounded and mobile (Berker et al. 2005; Bakardjieva 2006; Lim 2006), portable media devices modify domestic spaces and practices as they become progressively more homebound, and app-based media ecologies—often playful and sometimes also creative—are embedded within conflicting practices of familiarity, belonging, and being ‘alone together’ (Turkle 2011; Hjorth 2012).

Moreover, what constitutes mobile gaming differs dramatically over video gaming’s short history, and these shifts are further skewed by cultural specificity and the sedimentation of collective habits around a common and familiar interface. Early mobile gaming—often called portable or handheld gaming—was played on dedicated devices of Japanese origin, from Nintendo’s Game & Watch, Game Boy series, and DualScreen (NDS), to Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) series and Nintendo’s 3D-enhanced DualScreen (3DS). Interestingly, mobile gaming has always figured in video game history with the early 1980s, often known as the ‘Golden Age of Arcade Games’, fostering the rise of two of the most enduring directions in gaming—online and mobile gaming. Although there was some attempt to design mobile handsets with gaming platforms (e.g. the Nokia NGage in 2003), it wasn’t until the release of the first-generation iPhone and the launch of the App Store soon after, that a smartphone became a game platform in its own right.

Here it is important to highlight that the conflation between portable and mobile gaming has a distinctively Japanese origin. In Japan, as mobile media and gaming cultures expert Mizuko Ito (2005) notes, the ‘portable, pedestrian and personal’ have a long history that can be traced from keitai (mobile phones) and portable game consoles to tea ceremonies. The keitai, while translating to ‘mobile’, is saturated with the cultural richness and significance of ‘portability’ within Japanese history. In Western contexts, while the conflation between handheld gaming and mobile devices is perhaps becoming more applicable in terms of touchscreen functionality, networking capability, and the re-release of classic handheld games as Android and iPhone apps, they each have clearly different affordances and incongruent cultural histories. As we will explore in the first section of the book, it is the ubiquitous mobile phone—not the handheld game console—that has delivered mobile gaming into the mainstream, allowing for the large-scale cross-fertilisation of gameplay with location-based functionality, online browser-based SNS provision, and small media ‘produsage’ (user-produced content) (Bruns 2005) that ranges from the playful editing and uploading of personal photos and video to the design and development of apps.

Playing with place: Location-based service (LBS) games

All over the globe, LBSs that deploy GPS, geotagging and Google Maps have become a pervasive part of everyday life via platforms and devices such as touchscreen smartphones, tablets, and portable gaming devices. As location-tracking, navigational, and image-capture devices, our smartphones now dynamically frame and mediate the ways we traverse, experience, share, and conceptualise place. Mobile networked technologies not only transform how we understand place in everyday life, they also remind us that place is more than just physical geographic location; it is constructed by an ongoing accumulation of stories, memories, and social practices (Harvey 2001; Massey 2005). This is particularly the case within the realm of urban mobile gaming, which seeks to challenge everyday conventions and routines that shape the cityscape.

Although LBSs have been available on mobile devices since the early 1990s, it has only been fairly recently that they have become a feature of smartphones, and so available to people who would not otherwise have purchased a dedicated GPS unit. While locative media and the Internet both share a military history, they have also been quickly adapted for commercial use. As with the history of games more generally, the development of LBSs can usefully be thought of in terms of generations, each with its particular range of functionalities and practices. The first generation of LBSs were primarily navigational and availability was largely restricted to higher-end motor vehicles installed with such devices. Although there were some innovative and playful experiments with place and the built environment, this was limited to early adopters. The second generation emerged as GPS and locative services were embedded in multifunctional devices such as mobile phones.

The most immediate impact of these second-generation services for users of smartphones is through services like Google Maps, where an interactive map can pinpoint a user’s location and calculate the fastest route to almost any destination. Although the navigational capabilities this affords are important, it represents only a fraction of the potential of LBS services, particularly as they converge with social and networked media. It should also be noted that while this convergence of mobile, locative, and social media is quite new in some countries (particularly in the Anglophone world), in other countries like Japan the keitai has been associated with social and locative media for over a decade (Hjorth 2003; Ito 2005; Hjorth and Chan 2009). Now, with the increasingly widespread use of smartphones and the convergence of mobile, social, and locative functionality in these devices, the implications of this phenomenon are beginning to emerge in relation to the development of games.

Once a realm of experimental pedagogical and artistic exploration, location-based games have become part of a system of mainstream mobile media applications. With the rise of location-based games like Foursquare and Jiepang—in which users ‘check-in’ to physical locations overlain with digital information—the ways in which games, mobility, and place overlap are changing. As a reflection of broader sociocultural shifts in which work and leisure practices are blurring (Wajcman et al. 2009), mobile games and their ‘wireless leash’ capacities harness new forms of engagement that encompass various modes of co-presence (being with others across a spectrum of physical, virtual, and hybrid spaces), network presence (being online with others), and telepresence (mediated presence such as that offered by augmented reality games and applications).

The first generation of location-based mobile games were developed within an experimental and creative context by the likes of UK new media group Blast Theory (de Souza e Silva and Hjorth 2009) and sought to transform urban spaces into playful places. Indeed, much of the first-generation experimentation and exploration of mobile media artwork from the late 1990s onwards took the form of hybrid reality and location-based mobile games (Davis 2005; de Souza e Silva 2004, 2006) as they challenged our experiences of co-presence in the context of the familiar spaces of everyday life. As we discuss in the second section of this book, such games have raised questions around the accepted and expected boundaries between the virtual and actual, online and offline, haptic (touch) and cerebral (mind) interaction, and delay and immediacy (Hjorth 2008, 2009, 2010b). Examples include Pac-Manhattan (US), Proboscis’s Urban Tapestries (UK), various Blast Theory projects (UK), Mogi (JP), and Urban Vibe (SK).

The second generation of locative mobile games saw the commercialisation and mainstreaming of services and made-for-mobile applications such as Foursquare and Jiepang. While still in their infancy, these services represent an area of growing diversity and complexity within mobile media and communication, whereby the digital mapping and representation of place increasingly pervades and modifies our geographical and interpersonal experience of place. For Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel Sutko (2011), location-based mobile games and applications generate what they term ‘net-local space’—that is, a perpetual, evolving dynamic between information as place and place as information. While urban spaces have always been mediated by technologies, Eric Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011: 91) suggest that net localities ‘produce unique types of networked interactions and, by extension, new contexts for social cohesion’, such that ‘co-presence is not mutually opposed to networked interaction’, and distinguishing between them at any one moment becomes increasingly difficult. Location-based mobile games thus generate hybrid experiences of place and presence, requiring the player to integrate their own situated and embodied perception of the world with dynamic GPS-enabled information, embedded within an augmented and networked game reality.

Playful location-based apps that invite us to enact a hybrid experience of place and presence now proliferate in app stores. The Bike Box app, for example, enables cyclists in central Brooklyn to upload site-specific audio and listen to a ‘curated collection of geo-specific sounds provided by a variety of local land-use experts, historians, poets, artists, and other interpreters’. Bike Box creators aim to give users ‘access to the layers of lived experience, personal anecdote and history that are piled up invisibly on every street corner and city block’ (ARIS 2011). Here place becomes a collective accumulation of digitised ‘stories so far’ (Massey 2005) that nevertheless have residual physical and affective dimensions. Such games and applications, and their deployment within urban space, require us to rethink the spatial and place-based experience of being-in-public. LBS mobile games remind us, as Frans Måyrå (2003) notes in his examination of the experimental first generation, that place and the social have always been pivotal to gameplay. Although this link has sometimes been obscured by certain video-game genres and modes of play, in the second section of the book we describe how location-based mobile games can now generate rich and complex urban play spaces that are embedded with geosocial, collective, and personal histories of place, thus facilitating a new kind of ludic place-making.

As locative media become a familiar feature of mainstream culture—and location awareness the default setting for many devices—the implications and risks associated with revealing one’s location in real time via social media services such as Twitter, Foursquare, Loopt, and Google Buzz become apparent. The website pleaserobme.com, for example, deliberately calls our attention to the dangers of ‘telling everybody on the Internet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Section I: Mobile Media Games
• Section II: Locative Media and Games
• Section III: Social, Locative, and Mobile: New Cartographies of Gaming and Play
• References
• Index