Designing Place-Based Games (Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk)

At the end of April, I gave a lunchtime talk at the Pervasive Media Studio, located in Watershed on Bristol's historic harbourside, which hosts a diverse community of artists, academics, technologists and businesses exploring creative technology and experience design.

Since July last year, I have been part of the Pervasive Media Studio community myself, as part of my post-doctoral research role at UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre. Now thoroughly embedded in the life of the PM Studio, I wanted to use the opportunity of a lunchtime talk to share insights from my creative practice and research into designing games that engage with place.

Not only was the aim to  give some practical tips for those designing (location-based) games, but to provide something thought-provoking or inspirational for those interested in engaging with place across any kind of interactive or digitally-mediated experience.

The Pervasive Media Studio's talks take place every Friday at 1pm, both in the building and streamed live online via YouTube. You can watch the recorded stream of my talk above, which also has BSL interpretation.

           

RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021: Designing digital games as a geographical research method

Above is a recorded version (with subtitles) of the paper I presented in the Innovative Digital Geographies session at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 31st August 2021. This paper discussed designing digital games as a geographical research method and considered the relationship between this method and digital geographical knowledge more broadly, particularly in terms of what we consider 'innovative'.

I'd like to thank Zoe Gardner, Stefano de Sabbata, Katy Bennett and Tess Osborne for convening this fascinating double session, and the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG) for sponsoring it. Thank you also to the other presenters in the two sessions for sharing such inspiring research insights and techniques.

Mapping Space | Mapping Time | Mapping Texts Conference Poster

On 29th September, the Mapping Space | Mapping Time | Mapping Texts Conference was held online by Chronotopic Cartographies, in partnership with the British Library. Chronotopic Cartographies is a research project at Lancaster University, developing digital methods and tools that enable the mapping of literary works.

This interdisciplinary conference aimed to explore creative, conceptual and digital methods of mapping the spaces and times of a range of texts, bringing together fields as varied as the digital humanities, cartography, geography, literature, narratology and gaming. It asked what mapping a text can reveal and the challenges of doing so; how we can meaningfully connect the digital, imaginative and actual spaces of literary texts; and what methods and models might be useful in these endeavours.

This conference was originally due to be held in person at the British Library in July, but after the full scale of the pandemic became apparent earlier in the year, it moved completely online. Instead of presenting papers, delegates were invited to submit posters of their research to be displayed on a virtual poster wall on Flickr. Participants could then network via chatrooms on Microsoft Teams, or in Gathertown –  a virtual conference space that allows users to walk up to a person’s avatar and have a separate conversation with them via video call. The keynote presentations still went ahead as recorded videos which were shared in advance, while live Q&As with each presenter were held at designated times throughout the day.

Though it was unfortunate that we couldn’t hear all the papers in full, the conference team handled the online move very effectively, creating a well-organised and flexible format for engaging with each other’s work. On a personal level, this was also the first time I had produced a poster for a conference, and I was grateful to get experience in showcasing my work concisely using only visual means. I was pleased to get some positive feedback on what I’d produced from those who got in touch with me during the conference.

Here is my poster. You can also view it full-size alongside the other fascinating projects featured in the conference here. It outlines the design of my location-based game Canterbury in 3 Words, explaining the research questions I was asking, how the game works, the design challenges I faced, and the observations I made throughout my fieldwork in making and testing the game.

Big thanks to the conference organisers for making this event happen, and the other presenters for sharing such inspiring and thought-provoking projects.

Canterbury Arts Conference 2020: Location-based games as platforms for site-specific storytelling

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The video embedded above is the recorded presentation I gave at the Canterbury Arts E-Conference 2020, hosted online on 15th July 2020. This is a conference for practitioners and professionals across all disciplines working with the arts, to share knowledge, network and learn about a wide range of creative projects. While this conference is usually held in person in Canterbury, this year's online version was able to showcase a wonderful diversity of creative work from participants from across the world. The theme of the event was 'Art to the Rescue'.

My presentation was adapted from the paper I shared at the 20 Years of Seeing with GPS symposium in June. It 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, but this time focusing on its relevance in the creative fields of digital and location-based games, media arts and site-specific art. You can read the words from this presentation below.

I’d like to thank the organisers at Warnborough College for their work in putting together such a vibrant programme of presentations, and making the online conference format work so smoothly. I'd also like to thank my fellow presenters for sharing such exciting, diverse and worthwhile projects, which illustrated why art of all kinds is so important in our societies - now perhaps more than ever.         

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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.

20 Years of Seeing with GPS: Platforming place narratives with location-based games

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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 3^rd 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!)

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.

Introducing Canterbury in 3 Words

For the past seven months or so, I’ve been developing a location-based game as part of my PhD research. Building on early experimentation in the first year of my PhD, as well as The Timekeeper’s Return, the mixed-reality game I created for Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter in 2018, Canterbury in 3 Words is a digital treasure hunt that challenges you to discover and share stories unique to the city using the What3Words app.

The rule that defines the game is that each story must contain all three words in the What3Words address of the location it’s written about. Other players can then read stories shared on the game’s Facebook group and decipher the locations they describe using their knowledge of Canterbury and the What3Words app, aiming to find as many locations as possible and rise up the leaderboard.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the development of the game thus far: how I arrived at this concept for a location-based game, some of the gameplay features that players can expect, and what all this means for my PhD research.

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To put it concisely, my PhD research looks at the potential of location-based games as platforms for eliciting and telling the stories that make places meaningful.

This research project is practice-based, meaning that I’m employing creative practice – in this case, designing and developing location-based games – as a method through which I get ‘data’ I can use to answer my research questions.

Alongside more conventional research methods such as ethnographic observation and interviews, this allows me to gain insight into the processes of idea generation, initial design, testing, iteration and production that shape location-based gameplay, as well as how players negotiate the architecture of game rules and platforms.

In geography and more broadly across the (digital) humanities, researchers looking at games have been reluctant to engage in game development practices themselves, even though their highly iterative processes have a hugely significant bearing on what kinds of player experiences eventually unfold from games.

While there are many valid reasons for this, it can consequently become difficult for researchers to detect the tacit (yet often highly influential) knowledges that shape how creative works such as games are produced. These can include ideas that were tried but abandoned, gameplay elements that changed over the course of the development, practical constraints that needed to be overcome, and unexpected occurrences or considerations that had to be managed.

Many of these more tacit elements of the design process were encountered on the winding path that led to the current version of Canterbury in 3 Words itself, which was born out of an amalgam of earlier creative experiments. These ranged from very basic game concepts that were never developed any further, to a full prototype that was tested in person by my PhD supervisors.

The useful thing about making games from an academic perspective is that, unlike in a commercial game development environment where there is much more pressure to make something workable sooner, even ideas that end up needing significant refinement or fail to work as intended can provide useful findings for the research.

In fact, it wasn’t until late summer/early autumn last year when the idea of using What3Words addresses to tell stories about places first came to mind.

I already knew a little bit about What3Words and how it works – mostly through news stories about how it had helped the emergency services get to incidents in remote locations. What3Words claim that their service is built to ‘make everyone everything and everywhere easy to find’; the idea being that telling three words to someone is a much more efficient way of communicating location than the strings of digits we use to define GPS coordinates.

But I wanted to find out what critical geographers and cartographers had to say about the implications of this new method of identifying points on the earth’s surface.

As expected, many of the usual caveats of locative technologies had been discussed, such as how the geodetic movement of the earth can affect the accuracy of locative addressing systems over time. Many commentators also raise concern about the implications of an addressing system that is directly tied to corporate interests, when addresses in general are so important to everyday life globally.

From a cultural geography perspective, I’m most interested in the repercussions that associating certain words with certain places might have for how locations are imagined, represented and performed.

We can already see evidence of these kinds of impacts in the ‘gimmicky’ quality of the What3Words addresses. For example, we might chuckle at an opportune placement of words (such as ///best.home.ever, which is apparently a tree in Framingham, Massachusetts), and there are whole forum topics devoted to finding these kinds of addresses on the internet.

You can imagine how the addresses could become problematic, though, when their words become attached to politically or culturally sensitive sites. Yet What3Words continually distance themselves from the notion that the words used in their addresses could possibly ‘mean’ anything other than being signifiers of location.

It occurred to me that using the words from What3Words addresses as tools for storytelling, while adopting the format of a treasure hunt to play with the goal of making things ‘easy to find’, was a neat way to problematise such top-down, instrumental applications of locative technology while providing a fun yet challenging framework for people to tell their own stories of place.

In the way that the addresses themselves would provide the prompts for people to recount their tales, the gameplay demonstrates how the signifiers we attach to locations – and the cultural associations we make with them – are a crucial part of how they become meaningful to us as places.

Once I had settled on how the game was going to work, the next phase of the development was testing it.

Drawing on a wide range of local contacts, I managed to recruit 15 local people to play the game over a period of three weeks in November and December 2019. As well as recording my observations from activity on the game’s Facebook group using a research diary and screenshots, I then interviewed the testers who were actively involved in the game activity.

After transcribing all these interviews, I was left with a lot of text and images from the Facebook group posts, screenshots, research diary entries and interview transcripts to analyse.

Not only did I need to think about the relevance of what I had found from a geographical point of view (in response to my research questions) but I needed to think about how these findings would shape the design of the game going forward.

This segues nicely into talking about the gameplay features, where I can explain some of my design ideas in more detail, my decision-making regarding things that have changed or stayed the same since the test, and the implications for how players engage with places in Canterbury and their stories.

The first thing to note about Canterbury in 3 Words is the area in which the game is played: within the city walls.

As I’ve written on the game’s FAQs:

“The game area needs to be quite clearly defined so that people know which areas ‘count’ when hunting for story locations. Canterbury as a city covers a large area, particularly if you include suburbs, the University of Kent and other outlying areas, and it can become difficult to identify where the city begins and ends, let alone identifying one particular location within it. The city walls are a historic boundary line encircling an area of the city centre that contains a large number of unique and interesting sites, while being fairly easy to navigate. It will typically be the part of Canterbury that people are most familiar with.”

Interestingly, the original decision to set the game within this boundary was a fairly arbitrary one. As the game was only being played by 15 people, it seemed inappropriate and potentially unsatisfying to ask people to search for story locations across the whole administrative area of Canterbury.

Yet it was only when interviewing the game’s testers that I realised just how important this boundedness was for people’s experiences of the game. It prevented them from ever becoming too overwhelmed with possible locations for stories, and meant that they had a clearly defined area they could explore to search for story locations they didn’t immediately recognise.

Of course, once players know to stick within this bounded area of the city, the key activity that defines the gameplay of Canterbury in 3 Words is the sharing and finding of stories about places.

While this task might seem fairly self-explanatory on the surface, the requirement for the stories to include all three words from their locations’ What3Words addresses, and to have a photograph attached to the text, creates some interesting opportunities for creativity and strategy.
                            

If the place in question is covered by multiple What3Words squares, for example, a story author can choose a square with words that are easier, more appropriate or more interesting to fit into their story.

The writer can also be tactical about how they present information in their story text and image. Framing the image of the location in a certain way can make its context more difficult to identify, or ensure that only those with specific knowledge will be able to recognise it. Similarly, the style in which a story is written can make words that might otherwise seem out of place sound natural.

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There are tactics that people searching for the story locations can use too.

When scanning the story text, sometimes a word might strike the reader as being unusual to use in a particular context; as if it has been shoehorned into the story. This might suggest that the word is one of the three from the location’s What3Words address – information that can be particularly useful if you have a rough idea where the location might be. This can make identifying the precise square on What3Words much quicker.

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Information can also be gleaned from the framing of the story image (you could think about: where is the feature positioned? What kind of material is it made out of? What else is around it?) or the content of the story itself, which might suggest the kinds of activity you could expect in this location.

Once a person has found a story location, they should comment on the original post on the Facebook group to mark their find and share their experiences of finding it. But one question that might come to mind when someone comments on a story: how do you know if that person has actually found the story, or if they are just saying they have?

Well, in the test, the system operated so that once a story location had been found, the finder had to message the story author on Facebook with the appropriate 3-word address to confirm their solution as correct. Once they had received confirmation from the author, they could comment on the post on the Facebook page.

However, the test revealed that there were occasional issues with some participants not responding very quickly, or at all, to participants messaging them with solutions. This was sometimes because the author missed the message (e.g. if it appeared in their ‘Message Requests’ on Facebook, or was buried by other messages); sometimes people’s other commitments were a factor.
     

To minimise the frustration that this kind of delay could cause, I’ve changed the system so that a player can comment on a post as soon as they have worked out the story location.

Given that each story has to include all three words of the location’s What3Words address, it’s very unlikely that a player’s solution would be wrong if they have managed to find three words in a story that match a What3Words address in Canterbury (and if the location makes sense when looking on satellite view/Streetview). So it made sense to give finders the satisfaction of commenting on the post as soon as the solution is identified, and earning their point for the game’s leaderboard.

Now, the responsibility to check a solution is the story author’s. By monitoring activity on their story posts and messaging people who discover the story locations, the gameplay encourages them to take ownership of their stories and take interest in how people respond to them.

This is very similar to Geocaching, where anyone can log a geocache as ‘found’, but the geocache owner will eventually discover from checking the physical logbook in the cache container whether somebody has lied about finding it. It is also the cache owner’s responsibility to maintain their cache.

The evidence from Geocaching suggests that giving players greater responsibility in the running of the game in this way can not only help to organically maintain a high standard of gameplay, but also to create a benevolent community with the shared aim of creating positive experiences for other players.

Speaking of the sociality and community that can develop around location-based games, there is one major change I’ve made to Canterbury in 3 Words since the test: the incorporation of regular community events as part of the gameplay.

The decision to organise community events for the game was partly made after talking to some testers, who despite enjoying the game found that the experience of writing about and searching for story locations could be quite solitary. As the game can be played at any time, there is only a small chance that players would ever encounter each other while taking part, making it difficult to foster any sense of community among participants.

I also was keen for the game to speak more to the ‘live-ness’ of the city – the mobile, fleeting and partial ways in which we encounter different places in Canterbury during our daily lives – rather than players only feeling as if they were interacting with the urban fabric as a series of static locations to find or write about.

As well as being a platform for existing stories, I wanted new stories to emerge as a result of the gameplay; meaningful experiences that players can have as a result of actively taking part.
      

Looking at other location-based games such as Pokémon Go and Ingress, community events have been a successful way of bringing together individual players – many who might have limited time to play during the working week, or who otherwise struggle to meet and play with others – within particular areas to share collective experiences organised around the gameplay.

For the community events in Canterbury in 3 Words, stories will be commissioned around particular themes when the event announcement is made. These stories will then be arranged in a form of treasure trail, for which players will have to work together to find all of the locations. Importantly, story locations for these events will not necessarily be restricted to within the city walls. Rather, the sites will largely depend on what theme is chosen for the event.

Clearly, given the current pandemic situation, these events cannot take place physically at this moment in time. I’m still developing my ideas about exactly how they will work virtually, but I’m currently taking inspiration from Alternate Reality Games and other large-scale, internet-based, collective activities. To some degree, what I eventually end up with will also depend on the content of the commissioned stories themselves.

Regardless of what format they take, I’m hoping that the events will be able to bring to life some of the lesser-known stories that populate the city in a memorable way, encouraging conversation and sociality between players.

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So all that’s really left to announce is the date that people will be able to try the game for themselves.

The public version of Canterbury in 3 Words will be launching on Friday 24th April. Bookmark the links below if you're reading this before then; otherwise follow the links now to join in the fun!

Obviously, spending so much time indoors isn’t exactly how I expected this stage of my PhD fieldwork would go, for both me and those who play the game.

But I’m fortunate that Canterbury in 3 Words lends itself quite well to being played purely on the internet, given the range of online tools players can use to engage with the cityscape remotely such as Google Streetview, satellite view on What3Words/Google Maps, and search engines/image databases. Indeed, these services were used regularly by the game’s testers to play remotely during the cold and wet winter months.

I’m hopeful that those who are familiar with Canterbury will be able to use the game as an opportunity to reconnect with the city at a time when possibilities of travelling to and through it in person are restricted.

If you would like to play the game yourself, or want to share it with someone else, you would be more than welcome. Join the Facebook group here and check out the information website for the game here.