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Below is the written
component of the paper I presented in the Landscapes of Digital Games session –
which I also co-convened – at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of
British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 31st August
2018. The superscript numbers in the text indicate the number of the
corresponding slide you should view in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can access
the slides separately as a PDF here).
I’d like to thank
Emma Fraser and Nick Rush-Cooper for their efforts in organising this session
with me, particularly as someone who had not convened a conference session before.
I’m also grateful to the Digital Geographies Working Group for sponsoring Landscapes
of Digital Games, alongside an impressive number of other sessions on digital
themes throughout the conference. Lastly, I want to thank my fellow presenters in
this session, Umran Ali, Thijs van den Berg and Peter Nelson. As convenors we
were thrilled not only with the quality of the papers, but how well they spoke
to each other throughout the session. I hope the discussions we had can
continue as our own individual work develops.
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How1 are digital technologies affecting the ways we interact with
landscapes playfully? By2 extending playful practices into the
realms of computer software and the internet, we’ve already seen in this
session the range of virtual environments designed to enable fun and meaningful
experiences in video games. Yet playful3 expression isn’t somehow
abandoning the corporeal in its use of interfaces such as screens, keyboards
and controllers. Through their location-aware, communicative and mobile
capabilities, digital media are hybridising everyday physical environments by
cultivating interactive practices of information sharing, community building
and, ultimately, play.
Pervasive games are those whose
gameplay extends4 into the corporeal world; expanding Huizinga’s
notion of the magic circle of play spatially – beyond a delimited arena;
temporally – beyond specific time limits; and socially – beyond a designated
group of players. While video games are designed with a range of possible
interactions and interpretations in mind, pervasive games use digital
technology to channel the physical properties, affective intensities and
contingencies of already-existing landscapes to generate the conditions for
players to have “positively affective” experiences, to quote James Ash.
Today5, I’m going to
explore how landscapes are articulated in the playing of pervasive games. I’ll
be contending that landscapes are not the product of a directed relationship
between subject and object, but an emergent experience constituted in part by
the affordances of digital technologies, but in interaction with an array of
material, social and embodied agents that assemble contingently, in situ.
To make6 this
argument, I’ll be discussing Geocaching, a popular pervasive treasure hunting
game, played worldwide using GPS. The game relies on players hiding containers
called ‘caches’ in physical environments, and putting their coordinates online.
Using a GPS-enabled mobile device, other players can then travel to the given
coordinates to search for the cache. Each7 cache contains a logbook,
which is signed by every player who has managed to find the cache; and finds
are also logged on the individual page for each cache on the Geocaching.com
website, where players can describe their experiences in greater detail.
As an example8 of how
increasingly prevalent digital technology is incorporated into everyday life
through play, I became interested in how Geocaching articulated the idea of subject-object
relationships central to the concept of landscape. In what ways are landscapes
imagined, represented, performed and contested through the game’s practices?
My research into Geocaching
started as a small coursework project during my MA, in which9 I carried
out ethnographic fieldwork over a week in the city of Canterbury in Kent. This
involved not only downloading and playing the game myself, but also looking at
online descriptions of caches on the Geocaching website, and reading logs
people had written for geocaches they’d found. I’ve since continued playing,
finding 362 geocaches in total to date; and I’ll be using Geocaching as
platform for my practice-based PhD project on place-based storytelling. The
material I’ll be presenting today is informed both by the initial MA research,
and my subsequent experiences as a player since.
To elaborate10 on the
conception of landscape as an emergent, intersubjective experience, I’m going to
delve into the two main components of the Geocaching
gameplay experience. Firstly, I’ll discuss navigating to geocaches as a
process of attunement with the landscape; and then frame engaging with the narratives
of the cache location as a situated performance of a ‘geocacher’ role.
The11 game of
Geocaching is structured around a particular form of imagination: the pursuit
of what is hidden or ‘secret’ within everyday spaces, and also those ‘secret’
spaces lying beyond the bounds of the everyday. Yet, in the search for
landscapes that are ‘off the map’, the gameplay raises questions about what’s
‘on the map’ – and ultimately, the boundaries between the visible and
invisible, known and unknown, appreciated and unappreciated in imaginations and
representations of everyday landscapes.
From12 my initial
research, carried out in my home city of Canterbury, I became distinctly aware
of these boundaries when navigating to caches located along both my usual
routes through the city, and parts of my home city I wouldn’t otherwise go. The
very first cache I found was located in a car park less than 200 metres from my
regular route into town, yet I’d never travelled there before nor knew of its
existence. In the hunt for a secret, my cognitive map of the city had been
expanded to include a location and information that I wasn’t aware of
previously.
However13, even in
places I knew, searching for caches reconfigured the boundaries between visible
and invisible, particularly for caches that were hidden in plain sight. The two
pictured here were both clearly exposed, yet
being hidden above and below eye-level respectively meant they weren’t rendered
visible until I navigated using the GPS compass on the Geocaching app. Equally,
until that day, my relationship with these spaces had only been to pass through
to somewhere else; yet in this case the game demanded purposeful interaction
with their material features, to search for a hidden container. Taking part in
this gameplay meant that I payed closer attention to mundane details in the
environment, which I would otherwise likely ignore.
Together14, the
technology, game design and bodily senses of the player converge when Geocaching
to enact what Maja Klausen calls the ‘player gaze’ – the cognitive work of
interpreting, evaluating and making connections between things one perceives
during the play experience. The way this gaze is performed by players develops
over time. Through repeated practice, I typically find caches much quicker now
compared to when I started, and have observed15 other
experienced geocachers referring to this phenomenon as their ‘geosenses’ or
‘cacher’s eye’. This can involve recognising signs of disturbed ground,
understanding the sensitivity of the Geocaching app’s GPS compass, and keeping
in mind common hiding techniques (such as magnetic caches, or those wedged into
crevices of trees). Geocaching here involves a process of teleplastic attunement whereby technology and
gameplay combine to reorient bodily senses, fostering a player gaze that
re-programmes imaginations of landscapes by rendering the ‘strange familiar’
and the ‘familiar strange’.
In particular16, what
makes the design of Geocaching’s gameplay distinct from other pervasive games
is how the limitations of GPS are themselves
adopted to enable players to attune with their surroundings. While reaching the
given coordinates will bring the player within close proximity of the geocache,
GPS technology itself is only accurate within a 10-metre radius, and is
degraded further by physical factors such as tree cover. Yet rather than
fostering a detachment from the corporeal game environment, these affordances
force you to look up from your device and interact with the physical
environment to find the hidden container,
intensifying the player’s relationship with the corporeal landscape. In turn17,
other players have the agency to hide geocaches and engage with the materiality
of their locations in creative or elaborate ways, such as those shown here. A
geocache’s coordinates are there for anyone to see; it’s by engaging with the unique18
materialities of cache locations that geocachers become gatekeepers to
“intimate spatial knowledge” (to quote Bradley Garrett) and the “empowering and
exciting” attunement with the landscape that entails.
Nonetheless19, it’s
important to note the unevenness in the ability of players to adopt such affectively
powerful practices of navigation. As well as the immediate requirement for
participants to own and be able to use a GPS-enabled mobile device, many
geocaches are only locatable for premium members at geocaching.com, which costs
£25 a year for a renewable membership. On the official Geocaching app, free
membership only provides access to traditional caches, limiting the kinds of
gameplay in which these members can participate. As such, the division between
visible and invisible, and accessibility of the game landscape’s affective
potential, is entwined with a ‘digital divide’ at the level of the individual
geocacher.
By apprehending20
navigation to geocaches as an intersubjective process of attunement, we can see
that the affordances of each gameplay component – the technology, materials,
and the player’s own bodily and social capacities – all interact over time to
shape the affective qualities of the player’s journey through the game
environment. But how are these affective intensities articulated by players
when they reach cache sites, where the performative acts of retrieving and
signing logbooks engage with a palimpsest of past and present narratives of
play?
In the search21 for
hidden treasure in physical landscapes, players must negotiate the evental
happenings of the locations in which they are Geocaching. The player’s
experience of the landscape is conditioned by their agency as a participant in both the “situated multiplicity” of the
physical environment during play, and its broader narrative tissue, represented
by the geocache log and the stories of those who have signed it.
As Geocaching22 takes
place in public spaces that both players and non-players can access, passersby
inevitably become “requisites and stakeholders in the game”. Referred to by
players as ‘muggles’, passersby present challenges to successful participation
in the game: specifically, the risk of them unknowingly discovering and
misplacing or stealing the cache. To avoid such occurrences, geocachers must
perform acts of “stealth” to avoid
the attention that abnormal behaviour might attract from muggles.
In one23 busy urban
location in Canterbury, the importance of “stealth” became apparent to me when
looking for a cache hidden on the underside of a bench beside a pub, where
numerous onlookers sat outside. Rather than abandoning the cache, I devised a
tactic of using my body as a shield to block the view of the muggles, followed
by the socially acceptable act of bending down to pick up a pen I’d
‘accidentally’ dropped beforehand. These actions very much felt part of a
“secret society narrative”, whereby my willing suspension of disbelief in the
reality of the game – performed through symbolic acts of stealth – enhanced the
play experience. Rather than being a hindrance, the affective intensity of the location,
personified in the presence of people and their social norms, could be
channelled in playful ways to perform new stories of engagement with the urban
landscape.
Not all Geocaching24 attempts
transpire this smoothly. Indeed, aside from the risk of ruining other players’ enjoyment
through negligence, behaviours that conflict with social conventions have
triggered, for example, legal action and security alerts. The physicality of
the human body itself is a site of contestation in this regard, as presence in
public space, as well as participation in the community, may interact with
wider norms linked to race, gender and (dis)ability. As a white, able-bodied
male, I didn’t notice any barriers to access based on these embodied factors
alone.
Yet my participation25
has been restricted in other ways; most notably in one circumstance where I was
unable to reach a cache hidden high up a tree. After climbing about three
quarters of the way up the trunk without seeing the cache, I knew it must have
been placed higher. Yet even climbing that far in windy conditions was a nerve-wracking
experience. Had I attempted to climb higher, I recognised that I’d couldn’t
have made three points of contact on the trunk, which contravened the social
standards of climbing safety I’d once learnt. By abandoning my retrieval of the
cache, my experience was characterised by situated articulations of material
conditions, social norms and bodily capacities which were not simply playful or
serendipitous, but actively restrictive.
The first26 thing I
did following my failure was to write a ‘Did Not Find’ or ‘DNF’ log on the
cache’s virtual page, complete with a description of my attempts. By signing
the log physically if the cache is found, and online regardless, geocachers
mark their visits to cache sites and build a repertoire of ‘found caches’ on their
profile at Geocaching.com. Yet logging has two additional purposes. The first
is to share anecdotes and information with fellow geocachers, such as how
difficult the cache was to find, if there were muggles around, or if any
interesting events occurred. This form of logging can resemble a
psychogeographical “story-stacking” process, where each new inscription of
presence nurtures an “ecology of narratives” that is mapped and broadcasted
through the game’s digital technologies. More than this, though, logs such as
mine – especially DNFs – can signal any problems to cache owners, such as
caches that require maintenance or are potentially missing. The act of logging
is a situated performance of the geocacher role – to ensure the narrative
context of the game landscape remains intact for other geocachers to participate
in themselves.
Still27, if you look
at any geocache logs online, most comments are no more than a couple of
sentences, and many are simply a few words or abbreviations such as ‘TFTC’
(thanks for the cache). At the same time, the interface of the Geocaching
website and app don’t do much to encourage players to engage with what people
have written on the cache page. Logs are simply listed in chronological order,
requiring a lot of scrolling to read those further back. Together, the
technology exhibited in the design of the website and app, and the social
customs of cache design and logging exhibited by the community, delimit the
capacities of geocachers to interact meaningfully with the stories that make landscapes
significant to people.
In performing28 the
acts of stealth, logging and maintenance that embody the more interpretive
aspects of the landscape ‘experience’ in Geocaching, the potential for
geocachers to engage mindfully with the narratives of geocache sites manifests
in situ. The information-sharing and communicative capacities of the game’s
technology, materials and community are articulated by individual geocachers with
distinct bodily and social capacities.
When29 we consider the
concept of landscape itself, which apprehends space through ideas of
subject-object relations, we can discern a conception here that’s far more
distributed than a directed relationship between singular human subject and
physical landscape. If we refer back to the notion of the ‘player gaze’ and how
it manifests as a process of attunement, we can see that it involves a
continuous constructing and undoing of connections between the different
technological, material, social and embodied elements encountered during play.
The player’s not a gazing subject,
but rather is performing a “perceptual actualisation of landscape and self, of
materialities and sensibilities”, whereby their navigation and emplotment of
the environment unfolds contingently and over time.
It’s here that I’m recognising
the value of post-phenomenology as a framework for apprehending digital game
landscapes, as a theoretical approach that emphasises the mutual influence of material
objects and human subjects in the construction of experience. Both incidentally
and over time, we can distinguish the agency of non-human elements in
Geocaching in reorienting the player’s sensory and emotional perception, and in
turn how players act situationally to perform narratives of engagement with the
enveloping landscape. Here, digital technologies are not a medium or lens, but
have agency on us, other material objects, and each other. Their affordances
are co-conspirators in the stories that unfold as Geocaching practices are
performed.
Geocaching30 is a particularly
apt example for examining interactions between human and non-human entities in
landscapes of play as, despite technically being a ‘digital game’, much of the
gameplay seems to occur without the use of digital devices. In his ethnographic
work on the everyday realities of digital technology, Mike Duggan describes how
the ‘digital’ element is often not apparent during community-oriented practices
of Geocaching such as logging; yet without the technological architecture of
the gameplay, the broader emotional experience of the game would never come to
fruition.
Looking ahead to possible future
research, these observations signal the importance of further insight into the
ways digital technology is experienced in everyday
life, such that we can develop more nuanced understandings of how landscapes
unfold, which avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism, social
constructionism, or focusing on a singular thinking human subject. For
geographical research into digital games specifically, there’s ample
opportunity for deeper study into the processes through which game landscapes
come into being, from the early stages of design, programming and testing,
through to the end-user experience and wider social and cultural impact.
I’m hoping31 that my upcoming practice-based PhD
project can lead to some salient insights into all these stages of development,
as I’ll be adapting the gameplay of Geocaching to attempt to create new methods
of engaging with the stories that make landscapes meaningful to people.
