(Slide 1)
Hi everyone. I’m Jack Lowe, a post-doctoral research
associate at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research
Centre. I also design location-based games and I do narrative design for
digital games and other media.
(Slide 2)
I’m here to talk about what time travel might mean in the
context of location-based games – that is, games in which players’ physical
locations and/or actions are incorporated into the gameplay through media
interfaces. What does time travel mean in the context of these types of games?
(Slide 3)
Well, I want to start by stating the obvious: we can’t
literally be transported back in time, nor can we create perfect emulations of
the past through media, no matter how ‘immersive’ they supposedly are.
However, we can literally engage with elements of the
historic past in the places we inhabit.
(Slide 4)
Throughout this talk, I’m going to be talking about places
as assemblages. Assemblages are relationships between component parts that
aren’t stable or fixed. Things can be replaced or displaced, and some things
can also remain.
By thinking about places as assemblages, we can grasp how
elements of the past remain in the present, but how there are always elements that
are changing too – whether they’re material things, meanings or lived
practices.
(Slide 5)
I’ve got this quote here from Tim Ingold, an anthropologist
who talks about places in this kind of processual way. He says:
“…every place holds within it memories of previous arrivals
and departures, as well as expectations of how one may reach it, or reach other
places from it. Thus do places enfold the passage of time: they are
neither of the past, present or future but all three rolled into one. Endlessly
generated through the comings and goings of their inhabitants, they figure not
as locations in space but as specific vortices in a current of movement, of
innumerable journeys actually made.”
So when I look at this quote, it really makes me feel that
places are sites of time travel. They have multiple time periods folded
into them, produced by the journeys of the things that assemble in those
places.
(Slide 6)
And what I’m here to discuss today is how our engagement
with these elements from different time periods depends on how we navigate
through places.
In particular, I going to use the concept of wayfinding
in this presentation to discuss how we interact with different time periods in
location-based games.
Wayfinding is a practice of coming to understand your
whereabouts by connecting your movements with the narratives of other journeys
made in that place, by you and by other people and things.
But wayfinding isn’t a clear-cut process. Not everyone
finding their way through a place will make the same connections.
(Slide 7)
And this is a theme I’m going to be returning to when I talk
about how we engage with the past in location-based games.
My aim is to highlight how location-based games present compelling
opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of
the past and how the past connects with the present through place.
And I’m going to do this by exploring the relationships
between navigation and narrative in the design and play of two games I
created that directly focus on historic events.
Let me introduce them briefly.
(Slide 8)
The first is The Timekeeper’s Return. The Timekeeper’s
Return is a story-based treasure hunt designed for all ages, in which players
scan QR codes to discover the hidden histories of locations in Canterbury’s
Cathedral Quarter. The story follows the journey of a time-travelling
researcher called Mia Augustina, whose time machine has malfunctioned and
trapped her in the past. By interacting with role-playing local businesspeople
and using the information they provide, players must find and scan all the QR
code ‘triangulation markers’ in the Cathedral Quarter to recalibrate Mia’s time
machine and help her return. These QR codes also communicate Mia’s research
diaries, sharing the stories of what she has encountered in the past, in those
same locations.
(Slide 9)
The second game is The Gates to Dreamland. The Gates to
Dreamland is an interactive audiowalk set around the Dreamland Amusement Park
in Margate. The player triggers audio diary extracts to be played when they
find each of the 5 gates located around Dreamland’s perimeter. These diary
extracts describe the journey faced by Italian scientist Galileo, as he
attempted to publish his final book. Through symbolic and metaphorical
connections to the landscape around Dreamland, the audiowalk explores the
obstacles Galileo faced, as he lost his eyesight and his health worsened, and
how his perspective on the world changed. It’s ultimately about the power of
imagination in changing how you see the world, and it can be played in person
or online using Google Streetview.
So now I’ve introduced the games, let’s use this idea of
wayfinding to think about how we engage with the past by navigating through
places in location-based games.
(Slide 10)
In location-based games, one of the features of how you
navigate is that you can generally look and move in any direction that your
body allows. You are in control of your body and what you choose to focus on in
your surroundings.
This feature is one of the reasons that many digital games
and other interactive experiences are considered different when compared to other
narrative media like films or books. You have more agency to determine the
perspective from which you encounter things happening in the world.
This is called ‘dynamic focalization’.
(Slide 11)
However, in digitally-rendered worlds, designers still have
tactics to influence what you pay attention to. They can use visual techniques
like lighting and signposting, they can use sound design or they can change the
characteristics of the avatar you control. So while it still feels like you
have a great deal of agency in where you direct your attention, it is still
being manipulated by the designers of the digitally-rendered world.
In location-based games, you engage with a material world
using a fleshy body, not an avatar, in a way that isn’t limited by what has
been programmed into some software.
But this agency brings with it an awful lot of uncertainty.
(Slide 12)
I’m going to use an example from The Timekeeper’s Return to
illustrate this, which was the
QR code treasure hunt engaging with hidden histories of Canterbury’s Cathedral
Quarter.
One
of Mia Augustina’s research diaries from the past, communicated through a QR
code sticker, referred to the building pictured here. This building was
believed to be the inspiration for the house of Mr. Wickfield in Charles
Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.
When I tested the game, some players misinterpreted that the
building being described was the stone tower you can see in the image on the
right. To me, it seemed obvious from the positioning of the QR code that the
building people would look at would be the white building. As it turned out,
players would usually end up focusing on the more intricate, striking features
of the stone tower instead. So in the end, I had to change the research diary
text to deliberately direct players to look across to the other side of the
road, where the relevant building could be seen.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised, though, because
this is a common outcome when wayfinding in an unfamiliar setting. I’m sure all
of us can recall moments when we’ve been following directions that describe
landmarks, or when we’ve looked at the road layout on a map, yet still managed
to go the wrong direction because of what we happened to notice at the time, or
what we were paying attention to.
(Slide 13)
For Misha Myers, this is one of the particular qualities of
mobile media storytelling: that even in a linear story with pre-determined
routes, the narrative experience can be “undone by the particularities of ‘just
this body in just this place’ at just this time.” Wayfinding is an embodied
practice, and each body will have different capacities in different contexts.
Okay, so the embodied navigation that people do in
location-based games introduces contingency to the experience, which can
affect how players engage with historic elements in their environment.
(Slide 14)
But what happens if you lean into this contingency? What
happens if you accept the possibility that people might not notice certain
historic details, or will actively ignore information connecting to the past?
This is what I experimented with in The Gates to Dreamland, which was
the locative audiowalk about the Italian scientist Galileo.
Whether you’re playing in person in Margate or using Google
Streetview, when players listen to the audio diaries describing events in Galileo’s
life, as a designer I had no way of knowing what players might be looking at
or paying attention to at the time.
For example, one player described how, at this point in the
experience, they decided to use Google Streetview to zoom in on the person
pushing the pram. As you can see, that’s just one detail visible in the 360-degree
view of this location.
(Slide 15)
But rather than deliberately directing players’ attention to
particular things, like I did with The Timekeeper’s Return, instead I decided
to write audio diary scripts that were saturated with references to all sorts
of things in your surroundings. Even though Galileo was living in 17th-century
Florence, I could make connections to present-day Margate using metaphors and
symbolism.
When I interviewed players about the game, they all
described how what they focused on completely changed the connections they drew
between Galileo’s experiences and the area of Margate they were navigating. They
might only notice maybe a maximum of 40% of the references in the audio diaries,
because of what they happened to be paying attention to at the time. But that’s
fine, because when they did notice them, it was they themselves who had
uncovered that link to the past. And often they would perceive connections I
never even intended too.
This then helped them to understand the wider themes of the
experience: about the power of the imagination in creating connections across
different time periods and different parts of the world. Perception itself is a
form of agency.
By actively drawing on the contingency of wayfinding as an embodied
practice, the game demonstrated that there are no stable, unchanging
understandings of the past. The past is always encountered in a present, lived
context.
(Slide 16)
So we can see that the relationship between past and present
isn’t a neat one.
And this is clearly shown by places. In all places, some
elements of the past remain, others don’t, some are detectable, some aren’t,
some we know about and some we don’t.
In location-based games that engage with the past, the aim
of designers is to find forms of navigation that assemble interesting or
compelling connections between the past and the present in the places
people inhabit.
(Slide 17)
The Timekeeper’s Return was all about the hidden histories of
Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter, and the excitement of following the journey of
time-travelling researcher Mia Augustina as she encountered them.
Some of these histories are still visible in the environment
in some form – players just needed the opportunity to notice them. In this
image, the stones you can see embedded in the brickwork are the last remains of
the Burgate, a gate in Canterbury’s city wall that existed in various forms from the
Romans until 1822. Simply through the placement of a QR code at this location, the
attention of players who successfully found the sticker was drawn to this
material feature.
(Slide 18)
For other histories, however, there is no obvious physical
remnant for people to find. For example, while Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter
was extensively bombed during the Baedecker Raids of WW2, many of the bombed
areas have since been rebuilt.
In these situations, connections with the past must be made
in other ways.
One technique is to use the material features that do exist
as a reference point. For example, referring to the heights and distances
between things in players’ surroundings to indicate the scale of something no longer
there.
For the WW2 bombing example, one of the QR code research
diaries draws players’ attention to a street where the entirety of one side of
the street was flattened by the bombing, while all the buildings on the other
side remained intact. While the bombed side of the street has now been rebuilt,
I could still use this comparison between the two sides of the street to
demonstrate the extent of the destruction.
In The Timekeeper’s Return, then, wayfinding by using
historic details in the story and its comparison to the present-day landscape
gave players dramatic agency in how they assembled connections to the past.
(Slide 19)
But in The Gates to Dreamland, where the history being
explored happened somewhere else entirely (17th-century Florence), how
could players’ navigation of the environment engage with the past in a
compelling way?
The answer was to draw figurative and symbolic connections
between material features in the player’s surroundings and Galileo’s situation,
as described in the audio diaries.
At one of the gates to Dreamland, between the metal bars, the amusement park’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance.
The words from the scripted audio diary at this location imagine how Galileo’s first action, when
returning to his villa under house arrest in 1634, was to climb straight to the highest window of the house. Here, he
gazes upon the familiar view of the Torre del Gallo – a tower in
Florence – but his sight problems
render the view inaccessible.
Here, the listener
is invited to draw a figurative connection between the inaccessibility of
Dreamland’s landmarks and that of Galileo, in being house-bound and
increasingly visually impaired.
Of course, there are slippages in this process. In discussing
mobile media storytelling, Misha Myers describes the breakages and detours that
occur when participants ‘move between the fault lines of two presents’ –
one represented by the media, and one inhabited by the participant.
What’s compelling about this process of juxtaposition,
however, is that it provides gaps for players to fill in.
(Slide 20)
This can lead to all sorts of unexpected impressions too.
For example, one of the people who played The Gates to
Dreamland using Google Streetview decided to play with the platform’s date
range feature as they were navigating. As they witnessed the Margate landscape
change over time, their interpretation of the audio diaries shifted depending
on the version of Margate they navigated through.
Wayfinding is ultimately a propositional process:
proposing a way through the world by finding connections between the diverse
range of information you encounter, however jarring or conflicting it may be.
In these location-based games, players navigated the fault
lines between present-day contexts and information from the past, and then used
this to construct an understanding of place and its relationship with time.
(Slide 21)
The juxtaposition of a mediated history with an embodied
encounter of a place means that the impressions of the past that players form
typically aren’t simple, singular narratives. There are all sorts of influences
and perspectives that shape what people perceive about these histories.
Often, players of these two games would report how their
perceptions of places and their history changed as a result of playing.
For those who played The Timekeeper’s Return, probably the
two most common responses to the game were that a) they became newly aware of
historic features in the Cathedral Quarter that they didn’t know were there,
and b) that they learnt about the history behind landmarks which they
encountered on an everyday basis (as this quote shows).
(Slide 22)
In The Gates to Dreamland, which was often played remotely
using Streetview during the pandemic, the experience provoked interesting
relationships with memory. Galileo’s history became coloured by people’s existing
knowledges and impressions of Margate, as well as the version of Margate they
encountered on Streetview. Likewise, their impressions of Margate became influenced
by Galileo’s story. Suddenly, Margate became seen as a place connected to many
other entities across space and time. The understanding of the past that
resulted was deeply hybrid; an impression that cut across many different
influences.
(Slide 23)
However, there’s an interesting question about authenticity
here, which ties to some of the discussions we had during the last Bristol Digital Games
Lab event. Does it matter that people are engaging with Galileo’s history in a
context that’s completely foreign to the one he actually lived in? Does it
matter that the diaries aren’t Galileo’s own words, even though they’re based
on academic research and evidence from the historic record?
(Slide 24)
This is a debate that goes far beyond the scope of this
presentation, but what came out consistently from my interviews with those who
played these games was a heightened awareness of the range of possible connections
with the past that can be made – how multiple impressions of a place and its
past can come to define a site. Players recognised that one person’s impression
of Galileo’s journey, or one of the Cathedral Quarter’s histories, would be
constructed completely different from somebody else’s, depending on all sorts
of contextual factors. In The Timekeeper’s Return, in particular, players
frequently referred to a sense of community being generated. This collective, extroverted
sense of place came about as players engaged with a wide range of historic information
shared by several role-playing local businesspeople in order to navigate
through the game area.
Which brings me to the final point of this presentation. Wayfinding
is an intersubjective practice – it unfolds through the relationships
between things, rather than depending on a single person’s intentions.
And the same thing is happening with these games.
Impressions of the past unfold through the continual wiring and re-wiring of
connections between materials, meanings and practices that people encounter as
they navigate through places.
(Slide 25)
So overall, what can we say about time travel in
location-based games?
Well, location-based games as media forms are defined by
relationships between navigation and narrative. They’re about the synergy
between how you find a way through the world and the story of what unfolds.
In location-based games that engage with the past, different
forms of navigation are curated to connect what players encounter in the present-day
world with historic events.
This happens through a process of wayfinding, which I’ve
argued is an embodied, propositional and intersubjective process.
It’s embodied in how players have agency in the ways they move
and pay attention to the things they encounter, to feel their way through the
world.
It’s propositional in how there are ‘gaps’ or ‘fault lines’
between past events and what players encounter during the game, which players
have the opportunity to fill with their ideas and imaginations.
And it’s intersubjective, in how the impressions of the past
players form are created by drawing relations between multiple paths and
perspectives.
By arguing that time travel in location-based games is akin
to wayfinding, then, I’m suggesting that players’ interaction with the past isn’t
neat or uncomplicated.
Rather, location-based games present compelling
opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of
the past, by demonstrating the myriad ways that past and present are
continually assembled in place.
(Slide 26)
