Digital games are now widely
recognised as an increasingly influential part of cultures across the world,
with a global industry worth more than music and film combined. However, a crucial
part of games’ growing recognition as an artistic medium has been their unique capacities
for telling stories. Across many different genres of games, creators have been finding
innovative ways to use their interactive and playful properties to provoke
particular kinds of narrative experiences for those who play them.
Over the past couple of decades, one
genre to have risen to prominence is location-based games – those in which a
player’s physical location is central to the progression of the gameplay. The opening
of GPS to the public in the year 2000 was the catalyst for their emergence. Since
then, a wide range of digital devices and platforms have been developed not
only to help us locate, but to record and attach different kinds of content to
locations, visualise our journeys and share them with others.
Today, these functions are often
encapsulated in one device – the smartphone. And it’s on this device that we’ve
seen the development of the most popular location-based games. These include apps
such as Ingress, Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which are played
by tens of millions of people worldwide.
While many predicted that the rise
of the internet and digital technologies in our societies would make our
physical locations less relevant, these kinds of locative media arts have shown
how digital technologies can keep us connected to the sites we inhabit, in some
cases arguably intensifying our relationships with our surroundings. To use
geographical terms, these media don’t just impact how we think about space –
the abstract coordinates we use to mark points on the earth’s surface and the
distances between them. Crucially, they can help us encounter sites as places –
those that are meaningful to us as humans, associated with particular cultural
values, feelings, practices and memories.
In this way, locative media have
built on a broader range of site-specific arts, in particular those associated
with psychogeography. This toolkit of creative practices – playful, political
and narratological – seeks to encounter our everyday environments as sites with
layers of meaning and emotional significance that both shape, and are shaped by,
our behaviours and the experiences we have in these environments. Today,
psychogeography’s traditions echo in the realm of site-specific arts such as
audiowalks and place writing, and more recently digital media arts that use technology
to reimagine the ways we inhabit places.
My creative practice in making
location-based games aims to achieve something similar. For the past two years,
I’ve been undertaking a research project for my PhD, investigating the
potential of location-based games as platforms for telling the stories that
makes places in Canterbury meaningful to us. My focus on storytelling derives
from its close relationship with navigation. Our experiences of a place are
often shaped by how we encounter and thread together difference pieces of
information about it into stories we tell ourselves and others. I’m studying
how the design and play of location-based games can intervene in – and help to
cultivate – practices of navigation that weave together and bring into focus
the diverse narratives which shape our experiences of Canterbury.
This has involved a lot of
experimentation, as well as collaboration with local community groups, and has
resulted in projects as varied as small, unfinished Geocaching trails to
large-scale public projects. For example, in my last big public project in
2018, I was commissioned to make a location-based treasure-hunting game by
Canterbury Cathedral Quarter, a group of independent businesses based in the
historic streets around Canterbury Cathedral. This resulted in The Timekeeper’s
Return, an immersive, story-based treasure hunt played by scanning QR codes, in
which over 200 people took part on the day.
In this presentation, I’m going
to be focusing on Canterbury in 3 Words, a location-based game I’ve been developing
over the past 9 months using the What3Words geolocation service. Aiming to be
both playful and participatory, the game involves players telling their stories
of Canterbury, and trying to decipher the locations other players write about
using the What3Words app.
But first, what is What3Words? What3Words
is a free-to-use geolocation system and app 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 chosen 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.
You can try it out for yourself
right now. Open up a web browser, go to what3words.com, and in the search bar
type in ‘shunts.hammer.honest’. This should take you to a famous Canterbury
landmark. I’ll give you a couple of moments to do that now.
As I was developing ideas for my
game, 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 when the addresses seemed to match or compliment 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 finding locations easier is actually productive for understanding
them as places. I wanted to explore the potential of locative media for
engaging with place beyond the purpose of efficient navigation.
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 others
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 journeys 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 anyone can join, with players commenting on the posts
when they find the correct 3-word address used in the story – without giving it
away.
Here’s an example of a Canterbury
in 3 Words story. The three words highlighted here are the address words, which
have been hidden quite cleverly into the text by the author. If you try typing
in these three words into What3Words, you should be able to see this landmark’s
location in Canterbury. I’ll give you some time to do that now.
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 and recording my observations, I then
interviewed 8 of these players. After analysing the results and updating the game’s
design, I launched Canterbury in 3 Words publicly at the end of April. I’m now going
to talk about what I’ve found so far both from the initial test and in the
early gameplay since the launch.
Firstly, I want to talk about
opportunities for transforming people’s relationships with Canterbury through
creativity and discovery.
The two stories I’ve shared here
were two of the earliest stories shared in the test, 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 lent 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 captured 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 sites. 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, many players have
remarked on how the attention to detail encouraged by this small-scale
treasure-hunting gameplay changed how they encountered familiar locations. This
participant described how searching for this story location led him to discover
how many different styles of decorative lampposts there are in Canterbury,
which he’d never appreciated before. The game fostered the kind of critical
gaze I mentioned earlier – a form of attunement with players’ surroundings that
could re-enchant superficially mundane sites and invest them with new emotional
significance.
This attunement process became ever
more apparent to me in how individual players negotiated the game’s rules creatively
by employing tactics. When sharing stories, in their photographs some players
framed their subjects in ways that made the location less obvious by removing
context from the image. Also, if the landmark was covered by multiple squares
on the What3Words grid, they tended to choose the address with words that were
easiest to fit into the story.
When searching for story
locations, players often scoured 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 even
simply asking for help from others.
All these examples demonstrate
how the gameplay was able to cultivate creative practices of navigation that
used a combination of treasure-hunting and storytelling to transform and
re-enchant people’s relationships with Canterbury.
Digging deeper into how players
used the game’s digital platforms, 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 those with mobility issues and other commitments, this made the game much
more accessible. 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 sites in person.
For the majority of testers who
did play the game while physically being in Canterbury, the granularity of the
What3Words grid was sometimes found to be a frustrating 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 could lead them to a
neighbouring square instead. This happened with the story location shown here,
where the landmark in question is actually in the square to the right.
The stories themselves are all
shared via Facebook, which players have to already use to join in. Despite this,
many players have expressed their general dislike for the platform in
interview, with some citing privacy concerns. Participants also found some 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 making newer posts less visible.
Overall, then, we can see that
the digital services used for the game had both enabling and disabling impacts
on how 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 often find troubling.
However, the use of these various
digital platforms has certainly made a big difference in managing the situation
with the Covid-19 pandemic. When the lockdown began just as I was preparing to launch
the public version of the game, I was initially quite worried about how people were
going to participate. Thanks to social distancing and limitations on outdoor
activity, I knew it wouldn’t be possible for many Canterbury people to navigate
to the story locations in person.
Having seen how players embraced digital
platforms to play the game remotely during the test, though, I was confident that
I could make the game online-only and still get enough participation. For the
research, this provided an opportunity to study how platforms like Google
Streetview allowed people to engage with place remotely. And for the project
itself, I was able to advertise it as a fun activity during the lockdown that
would keep people connected to the city even at a distance.
Some adaptations did need to be
made to the gameplay, though. As well as taking their own photographs of places,
participants can now use licensed images from the internet, including cropped screenshots
from Google Streetview like this participant did here. While there are some
limitations in terms of image quality and framing, it meant that people could still
contribute stories without being near Canterbury city centre.
One thing I couldn’t replicate
was the experience of encountering places on daily journeys through the city.
This low-level engagement with the game was important in the test as the game
relies upon people being inspired to write stories about the city and discovering
those already shared, and these situational encounters helped to transform the
ways testers encountered the city in their everyday lives.
So to provide a new springboard
for creativity and interest in the online-only version of the game, I’ve been
using two main techniques. The first is weekly themes. At the beginning of each
week, I choose a broad theme which players can decide to respond to in the
stories they write. These prompts provide distinct perspectives on the city
that can sometimes inspire players to share stories about places and
experiences that connect with the theme.
More recently, I have also
created weekly challenges, where I provide a list of What3Words addresses in
Canterbury and players have to work out the connection between them. Although this
feature is more curated and perhaps less participatory than the normal
gameplay, it’s a fun activity that helps to keep participants engaged with the
game and the city at a basic level.
Looking forward, I’ll be
continuing to iterate on the game’s design over the coming months. One of my
key plans is to create a book out of the stories, which as well as archiving
the project could act as an alternative, playful guidebook to the city. In
order to gather more stories for the book, I’m aiming to host the game on a
wider range of social media platforms and make the whole project more public-facing.
If possible, I also want to work with local community groups to reach a more
diverse set of people. By making a more long-term and wider-reaching
intervention into Canterbury’s social life, I’m hoping that an expanded version
of the project based on making the book can make a difference beyond the
confines of my research outcomes.
So while this project is still
very much in development, what I hope to have shown in this snapshot of
Canterbury in 3 Words are some of the opportunities and challenges that
location-based games present for telling stories about places. By reconfiguring
locative media away from simply making things ‘easy to find’, location-based
games can draw attention to small-scale, everyday places in the city and
re-enchant them by telling stories that reveal the unseen emotional residue
these sites can have. My work shows that this doesn’t have to be particularly
high-tech, but you need to think carefully about which platforms you do choose
to use, and the barriers to access and ethical concerns they may present.
Despite these limitations, in my case the versatility of the game’s design and
the platforms used has meant that people could still participate during the
pandemic, at a time when many can’t easily travel to the city centre.
If you’re interested in getting
involved in Canterbury in 3 Words yourself, you can find all the information
about the game on the project website, and join the game’s Facebook group using
the link on this slide. Both of these pages will be updated as the project
develops.
Thank you.
