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The video embedded above is the recorded presentation I gave at the 20 Years of Seeing with GPS symposium, hosted online by the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London on 12th June 2020. This event marked the 20-year anniversary of GPS availability in the public realm, asking and reflecting upon how GPS has affected how we see the world.
My presentation discussed the potential of location-based games as platforms for storytelling about place, drawing on findings from testing my own game Canterbury in 3 Words, which I developed as part of my PhD fieldwork. You can read the words from this presentation below.
I’d like to thank Claire Reddleman and Mike Duggan for organising such a thought-provoking and inspiring event, and for persevering with hosting the symposium online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (and despite numerous technical challenges). I'd also like to thank my fellow presenters and those who attended the symposium for being part of such an illuminating, critical and creative discussion around GPS.
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GPS, and the locative media that
operate using this technology, are often upheld as an example of how the
specificity of place has been re-established in our globalised, ‘digital age’.
With the internet’s capacity for information sharing, and mobile devices that
let us access and attach information to locations in situ, it’s been suggested
that locative media can intensify our relationships with the places we inhabit.
In talking about ways of seeing
with GPS, I’m going to talk particularly about seeing playfully, in the
form of designing and playing location-based games. I’m going to discuss the
possibilities and challenges of these media for re-purposing instrumental
applications of GPS towards providing platforms for diverse narratives of
place. In the process, I’ll be suggesting that location-based games offer
illuminating vantage points for understanding the affordances of locative technologies
and platforms, as the practices of playful navigation that players adopt articulate
the ways they both enable and inhibit means of attending to place.
I want to begin by highlighting
that for as long as GPS has been open for public use, it’s been used for play. The
first ever geocache was hidden on May 3rd 2000, the day after selective
availability was removed from GPS, which spawned the treasure-hunting game
Geocaching that’s now played worldwide by millions of people. Since then, creative
practitioners have drawn on the specific attributes of GPS to create ludic
experiences centred on various forms of location-awareness. These include games
that play with GPS’s accuracy as well as its inconsistencies, its relationships
with forms of digital mapping, geo-tagging information shared via the internet,
and the pervasiveness of its everyday usage in the Global North.
In doing this, location-based
games and other playful applications of GPS have, to varying degrees, re-attuned
awareness and reflection on locative technologies and the infrastructures that
enable them, at a time when their pervasiveness has arguably made them less
visible. At the same time, these media have been harnessed to shift modes of
attention towards our surroundings in “sensory-inscribed” ways, as Jason
Farman puts it. Examining location-based games can therefore be fruitful for
apprehending the dual embodied and representational processes through which
locations become meaningful to us, and the technologies with which these experiences
unfold.
Traditionally, play has been
understood as a sphere separate from everyday life; a magic circle entered voluntarily
where special rules apply. Location-based games, however, are an example of pervasive
play - one in which the magic circle is expanded to incorporate spaces and
times of the everyday. The transformative potential of these games, it’s
argued, is in how they draw on the ‘meaningful inefficiencies’ of play rules to
cultivate new forms of awareness towards, and interaction with, the places we
inhabit and their associated rhythms.
When it comes to the stories
of place, we can observe how location-based games build on navigational
practices fostered in earlier pervasive media such as audiowalks, which use
movement through space as “narrativizing” practice. This close relationship
between navigation and narrative can be explored further as locative media draw
together different means of accessing and communicating information, which are
articulated by the participating user.
My research sought to investigate
the potential of location-based games to be both playful and participatory;
telling and eliciting stories of places. But rather than approach this question
by studying finished works, I wanted to learn about the affordances of these
media in practice and in context, where I could access processes and
relationships of production that are typically tacit and less visible. Game
design in particular is highly iterative as a creative process, as you attempt
to configure the contingent ways that people interact with the system you curate.
I wanted to figure out what opportunities and challenges would arise in practically
making a location-based game focused site-specific storytelling, to better
understand how ludic practices of design and play might enable meaningful
engagement with place.
I’m going to discuss this
research here using the example of making Canterbury in 3 Words, a
location-based game I made in my home city of Canterbury using the What3Words
geolocation service.
But first, what is What3Words?
What3Words is a free-to-use, commercial platform and geolocation system that
divides the world into 3-metre squares and gives each one a unique 3-word
address. These 3-word addresses never change, and are determined by an algorithm
that converts GPS coordinates into the What3Words grid, attaching words from a
library of those approved.
The company’s mission is to ‘make
everyone, everything and everywhere easy to find’ – the idea being that it’s
much easier to communicate location by saying three words than reeling off a
list of coordinate digits. This idea came about when a delivery to the
company’s founder ended up in completely the wrong location because a driver
misheard GPS coordinates being relayed over the phone.
Since being founded in 2013, What3Words
has partnered with a growing number of large corporations who make use of their
system for purposes such as logistics and automotive navigation. In the UK, the
service is often recommended to the public by local emergency services, as a
way to quickly and accurately communicate your location in an emergency.
Notably, the company has also partnered with postal services in Mongolia and
Tonga, where What3Words has become the default addressing system in communities
where street addresses never previously existed.
Unsurprisingly, though, this new
method of mapping and locating presents a range of potential issues. What3Words
is owned and managed as a business. The algorithm used to convert GPS
coordinates to 3-word addresses is proprietary rather than open source, and
even free users need to agree to a lengthy set of terms and conditions before
using it. Individuals or organisations wanting to make high-volume use of their
API will have to pay.
The words themselves too can be
problematic. Obviously they’ll have pre-existing cultural associations – that’s
part of why the system is said to aid communication. Users are aware of this
when they spot amusing or opportune combinations of words, and there are whole
forums online dedicated to finding these. But you can imagine how certain
addresses could take on new significance when attached to culturally or
politically sensitive sites.
Language settings are another
factor. What3Words is currently available in 44 languages, however the same
3-metre square will have a completely different address in each different
language, meaning that there’s no direct way to translate between them.
Lastly, geodetic movement can
hinder the accuracy of an addressing system using a static grid. If an object shifts
into a neighbouring square following events like earthquakes, it will have an address
that bears no similarity to its previous one.
With these caveats in mind, as I
was developing my design ideas, I was struck by how evocative the three-word
addresses could be, even though their role on the platform itself is very
instrumental. Addresses like ‘snows.alarm.builds’ almost seemed to suggest
micro-narratives in themselves. Furthermore, as the second address on this
slide shows, there were occasionally uncanny moments of synchronicity between
the addresses and what could be found physically in the locations. It occurred
to me that these combinations of words could potentially be interesting tools
or prompts for storytelling.
I was also struck by the
company’s aim for What3Words to make things ‘easy to find’. I started thinking
about whether being able to find locations easier is actually productive for
apprehending them as places. I wanted to explore the potential of geolocative
platforms for engaging with place beyond the instrumental purpose finding
specific locations.
The idea of a treasure hunt
appealed to me as a type of game that both relies on locating, yet typically entails
a slower, process of navigation that reconfigures forms of attention with your
surroundings. In the process, players adopt a certain critical gaze through
which they notice things about their environment that they weren’t previously
aware of.
I was particularly inspired by
the painted rocks game, which is played in local communities worldwide using
Facebook. Players hide rocks they paint themselves in public places, and other
players post photos with them to show when they’ve been found and rehidden.
What struck me was how embedded it is in the everyday life of local communities,
relying both on people coming across the rocks during their everyday activities
and when doing their daily browsing on Facebook.
Drawing these ideas together, I
devised Canterbury in 3 Words. The game involves sharing stories about places
in Canterbury that use all three words of their addresses on What3Words, as
well as a photograph clue. Other players can then attempt to find the locations
using the information provided and the What3Words app.
The stories are posted on a private
Facebook group, with players commenting on the posts when they find the correct
3-word address used in the story – without giving it away.
In November and December last
year, I tested this game with 15 local people over a period of three weeks.
After monitoring the Facebook group during this time and recording my
observations, I then interviewed 7* of these players in the weeks after the test.
The findings I’m going to talk about now are all based on this period of my
research, though as I’ll explain later, the game has since evolved further.
*(I actually interviewed 8 of these participants; this was a mistake!)
*(I actually interviewed 8 of these participants; this was a mistake!)
Firstly, I want to talk about the
opportunities the game enabled for creativity, discovery and improvisational
relationships with Canterbury.
The two stories I’ve shared here
were two of the earliest stories shared in the group, and I was surprised by
the form they took. The author of the story on the left had decided to write
his story as a poem, while the author on the right was inspired to write her
story as an example of fantasy fiction.
When interviewing the author of
the poem, he highlighted how the requirement of having to include the three
words from the What3Words address in his story stimulated his creativity in a
way that wouldn’t have happened if he was simply asked to ‘write a story about
Canterbury’. The game rules afford him the opportunity to communicate a unique
style of place narrative that might not have been shared otherwise.
Meanwhile, the author of the
fantasy fiction told me she knew she wanted to write a story about these stone
sculptures in the river, but it was the 3-word address that provided the lens
through which her place narrative was told. The word ‘ritual’ in particular led
her to re-imagine the story behind the sculptures in a way that was able to
capture what she understood as the ‘magical’ qualities this place has.
For discovering stories shared in
the group, the treasure-hunt format of the game, combined with the small-scale,
3-metre squares of the What3Words grid, made many players newly aware of places
they didn’t know existed. I experienced this myself with these two images from
stories shared in the Facebook group. I walk past these spots nearly every day
in normal circumstances, but until the game test I’d never noticed these particular
details. I was then inspired to find out the history behind them, discovering
that the ‘Farewell’ plaque, for example, derives from one side of an old city
gate demolished in 1833.
Equally, multiple interviewees
remarked on how the attention to detail encouraged by this small-scale
treasure-hunting gameplay changed how they encountered familiar locations. This
participant recounted how, in the process of looking for a story location whose
picture clue was a lamppost, he discovered how many different styles of
decorative lampposts there are in Canterbury, which he’d never appreciated
before. In her discussion of Geocaching, Maja Klausen argues that it through such
processes of attunement – a particular ‘player gaze’ combined with the
affordances of mediating technologies – that pervasive games can ‘re-enchant’
everyday urban spaces by revealing the affective potential that exists
alongside the quotidian.
The performativity of this
attunement process became most apparent to me in how individual players would
negotiate the game’s affordances creatively by employing tactics. When
sharing stories, in their photographs some players would frame their subjects
in ways that made the location less obvious by removing contextual cues from
the image. Also, if the landmark was covered by multiple squares on the
What3Words grid, they’d tend to choose the address with words that were easiest
to fit into the story.
When searching for story locations,
players would scour the story texts to find words that seemed ‘out of place’ as
clues for those that might be in their What3Words addresses. Furthermore,
navigating to the story location for many participants involved triangulating
between multiple sources of information outside of What3Words and Facebook,
including Google searches, satellite view and Streetview on Google Maps, or the
more analogue method of asking for help from others more familiar with the
city.
All these practices demonstrate how
the gameplay mechanics were able to cultivate creative practices of navigation,
articulating the affordances of locative technologies and other digital
platforms in situ to both engage with and tell stories of places in Canterbury.
Digging deeper into how players
used the digital platforms employed for the game, however, the test
revealed how What3Words and Facebook could be both enabling and limiting in
different ways. Because the stories and records of finding them were all
online, many players realised that the game could often be played without
having to physically be in Canterbury. For some, this made the game much more
accessible, particularly at a busy time not long before Christmas when many had
other commitments and the weather wasn’t ideal. However, other participants
felt that the game would have more ‘merit’ as a method of engaging with place
if players were required to go to the places in person. Some even suggested
adding features like GPS tagging to check this.
For the majority of players who
did play the game while physically being in Canterbury, the granularity of the
What3Words grid was found to be a limitation for both creating stories and
finding story locations. As the 3-metre squares cover such a small area, any
GPS inaccuracies on their mobile devices meant that the app could give them an
address for a neighbouring square, rather than the one where their feature was
situated. This happened with the story location shown here, where the landmark
in question is actually in the square to the right. When finding story
locations, players found that even when they visited the correct locations in
person, there was often a slightly frustrating process of tapping on quite a
few squares in the vicinity before they could identify the correct one.
The stories themselves and
records of finding them were all shared via Facebook, which all the players bar
one used before participating. Despite this, many of them expressed their
general dislike for the platform in interview, with some citing privacy
concerns, and others saying that they now only use Facebook for specific
reasons, such as using groups like mine. Indeed, all of the interviewees said
that they only accessed the game group directly or after seeing specific
notifications for it, rather than seeing the posts when browsing their Timeline.
More functionally, participants
felt there were limitations in how Facebook organised information. Posts on
Facebook groups are ordered by recent engagement rather than most recently
posted, which had the effect of sometimes ‘burying’ newer posts. Furthermore,
in the use of Facebook Messenger to check each other’s solutions, messages from
other participants would often be hidden in ‘Message Requests’ – essentially a
‘junk folder’ – if they weren’t ‘friends’ with them on the platform.
Overall, then, we can see that
the affordances of the digital services employed in the gameplay had both
enabling and disabling impacts on the spatiotemporal processes through which
the players engaged with places in Canterbury. While some players negotiated
these affordances in ways that provoked creative and re-enchanting methods of
navigating the city, in other instances these platforms presented barriers to
participation that could be frustrating. Particularly with Facebook, it made me
question the ethics of using a platform people find troubling despite being
widely used.
Before I conclude, I want to
highlight one surprising observation from this fieldwork. For the test, I asked
players to only write about locations within Canterbury’s city walls, as I felt
the whole city was too wide an area for 15-person treasure hunt. I didn’t think
much of this, but in interviews players frequently mentioned how grateful they
were to know which areas ‘counted’, otherwise the locations could be ‘anywhere’
and would have discouraged them from searching in person. Some even suggested
that confining the spaces and times further, perhaps in the form of game
events, would have helped make the game a less ‘solitary’ experience, involving
communicating in person rather than just through individualised digital
devices. These comments indicate a continued importance of boundedness even for
pervasive play, which raises some interesting questions about how these media
are able to apprehend place expansively in terms of mobilities and
trajectories. In the public version of the game, I’m exploring the question
further in the creation of live, themed events that seek to develop more mobile
and collective methods of interacting with the city using What3Words.
What I hope to have shown in this
brief snapshot of my research with Canterbury in 3 Words is how engaging with
location-based games can help to apprehend the affordances of locative
technologies and platforms for engaging with place. Practices of playful design
and play in location-based games entail navigational processes that enact how
our relationships with place are formed through articulations of technologies,
bodies and social norms. These practices can reorient locative media away from
the instrumental purposes of identifying location efficiently, creating
opportunities for storytelling and re-enchantment within everyday environments.
Yet they come with caveats that raise important questions concerning barriers
to access, ethics and the individualism of devices that have wider relevance
for understanding what ‘location’ and ‘place’ mean to us in the so-called
‘digital age’.
These are questions that I’m
probing further in the public version of Canterbury in 3 Words, which has now
been live for over a month. This has involved iterating further on the design
of the game, including incorporating live events as part of the gameplay, and
further experimentation will be happening over the next few months. The
Facebook group currently has 65 members, but it would be great to have more –
so if you know anyone who is familiar with Canterbury, do let them know about
the game.
