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.
For the past five years, I’ve
been making games which explore our relationships with the places we live in.
These games have all been location-based: taking place outdoors and focusing on
interacting with your physical environment. However, until now, I hadn’t been
involved in making a fully digital game.
This changed when I learnt about Global Game Jam (GGJ). GGJ is the world’s
largest game creation event, bringing together tens of thousands of
participants in locations all over the world. Over 48 hours, participants are
tasked with creating a game that responds to a central theme revealed when the
jam begins. This year, the theme was ‘roots’.
Following the reveal, everybody
at the Bristol site where I was participating gathered to form teams. After
meeting Grace Ball, a writer who shared my interest in designing a story-rich
game, we met Josh Regan, a programmer who would make the interactive parts of
our game work. His brother, musician Frank Regan, later joined us to bring our
world to life through sound design.
Out of nothing, we had a
multi-skilled team of four people who had never worked together before (even
the brothers!).
What we ended up with 48 hours
later was a narrative puzzle game called Interment.
Interment is about the connection
between the stories of our ancestors and the stories we make today.
You play as a contractor for developers
who are planning to build houses on an old family graveyard. As part of the
planning permission, the graves must be reinterred elsewhere with accurately
named headstones. Your job is to match the currently unreadable, crumbling
headstones to the correct person using archive material and clues in the graveyard
itself.
This archive consists of
transcripts of documents belonging to family members buried in the graveyard,
including a will, diary entry, death certificate, letters and even song lyrics.
In these, you get a fleeting sense of the family members’ lives and
relationships.
My role in the team was as a
narrative designer and writer, working with Grace to build the fictional world
of the game.
The first stage of this process
was ideation with the entire team on the first evening of the jam, simply using
pen and paper.
Our initial responses to the jam
theme led to the idea of an old graveyard with headstones that were barely
legible anymore. We talked about making a game that involved uncovering the
mysteries behind the graveyard, using historic evidence and the scraps of
information you could still glean from the headstones, like motifs, initials, types
of stone and objects positioned next to the stones.
In asking the question of what fictional
justification there could be for deciphering who was buried in an old
graveyard, I came up with the idea that the graves were being re-interred
elsewhere. The player needed to work out exactly where each person was buried
to ensure they would have accurate headstones in their new resting places.
With this basic idea and some
initial character designs, we all got on with our individual tasks. Josh developed
the 2D graveyard environment in Unity; Frank worked on musical motifs for each
character and the game’s theme music. For Grace and I, the task was fleshing out
the game’s characters and their stories.
In most cases, we already had a
rough idea of what kinds of stories would be interesting to tell in a family graveyard
environment. Our job was to create pieces of archive evidence that communicated
these characters’ stories – and indicated which graves they were associated
with – in an interesting and evocative way.
As this was a puzzle game, we
wanted the player’s discovery of the stories and their associated graves to
involve a satisfying degree of thought and interpretation. This meant thinking
carefully about the relationship between the fabula (the factual events/details
of the story) and the syuzhet (how the narrative information would be represented
to, and encountered by, the player).
Our design process involved
deciding which bits of information would be shared with the player upfront, which
would be subtext (i.e. implied or inferred), which would need deciphering based
on several smaller bits of information, and which details would be left to the
player’s imagination. We also had to think carefully about what order
players would encounter different narrative details.
All these factors influenced the
writing we did: the types of documents we created, the writing style and the level
of detail contained in each piece of text. For example, because we knew the
gameplay would involve interpreting relationships between characters, the archive
evidence we created would often tie two or more characters together (e.g. a
letter from one character to another, or a document that mentions multiple
characters).
We used a shared Google Doc to
write and edit the game’s text in tandem and decide on its positioning, as well
as pen and paper to sketch out the boundaries, relationships and intricacies of
the fictional world. Two sketches in particular were crucial here.
The first was a family tree, to visualise
how the characters were related to each other, when they were born and when
they died. This was important to ensure we were consistent with all of the
dates and names we mentioned in our documents (making a mistake with these
details could make the puzzle impossible to solve!).
The second was a sketch map of
the graveyard, to show how all the individual narrative details would be portrayed
within the game’s environment. This not only helped our programmer Josh to know
where each piece of content should appear, but also made it easy for us, as
narrative designers, to keep in mind exactly what the player would be seeing
and hearing at any point.
By having this at the forefront
of our thinking, we could design the game such that players would encounter
information in a way that was satisfying for unravelling the mystery of the
graveyard.
At the end of the jam, each team
presented their game to the other participants and a panel of judges.
To our amazement, Interment won the Bristol jam’s Grand Prize. The judges praised the completeness of the game,
how it responded to the jam’s theme and the detail in the game’s design.
We each won a mug labelled
‘Global Games Jam Winner 2023’ and some chocolates.
It will take most people about 30
minutes to complete.
Overall, we’re really proud of
what we were able to make in such a small period of time. We hope the game is
both enjoyable and makes players think, reflecting on what it is to have roots
in a place and what it means when these roots are severed.
On 25th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.
Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.
In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.
More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.
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One of the overriding resonances
I detected in Galileo’s story was the feeling of enclosure and inaccessibility.
Galileo was under house arrest
for the duration of his time writing Two New Sciences; an experience of
confinement that recent lockdowns have only briefly exposed us to. Losing his
sight at the same time ‘confined’ him further, in a different sense; altering
his ability to perceive the world beyond him.
Along the route between Dreamland’s
gates, I used the words of my script to draw attention to moments of enclosure
in the listener’s journey through the physical environment.
At the opening gate, between the metal
bars, the sight of Dreamland’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance. The
words from the first scripted diary entry imagine how Galileo’s first action,
upon returning to his villa marshalled by armed guards, was to climb straight to the highest window of the
house. Here, he gazes upon the familiar view of a tower on a hill (though I do
not name this, it would have been the Torre del Gallo in Arcetri), but his
sight problems render the view inaccessible.
Here, the listener is invited to
draw a connection between the inaccessibility of Dreamland’s landmarks and that
of Galileo, in being house-bound and increasingly visually impaired.
The Torre del Gallo in Arcetri, Florence
Dreamland's Helter Skelter
In this early stage of the
experience, you walk along a road often busy with car traffic and lined with terraced
housing. As you stand beside a seemingly unbreachable metal gate, the words
in the audio diary bring attention to these elements of your surroundings that
convey a sense of being squeezed in.
This continues as you descend down the hill, still confined by terraced housing but with widening
space visible in front, creating the sense of being funnelled down the
street towards an opening. At this point in the scripted diary entries, while Galileo
is still very aware of the limitations he faces, there is a feeling of progress
being made as he begins to chart his plans for writing Two New Sciences.
As the walker’s
perspective briefly widens, another key theme of the work is illuminated: the
opportunities for growth, creativity and imagination that restriction can
entail.
With the view opening out onto the usually busier area around
Dreamland’s car park, Galileo describes the encounters he has with numerous visitors
to his home. Vincenzo Viviani, who would become Galileo's student assistant, is highlighted as a key figure; and Galileo
describes a clarity and order that emerges from the chaos of his cluttered and
busy home life. In an ironic yet symbolic twist of fate, this is the time when Galileo loses
his sight completely.
Up to this point in the work,
multiple references are made to plants and weeds, which can be seen in many
areas around the outskirts of Dreamland.
I was drawn to the image of his garden
being gradually being overtaken by weeds as he committed himself to writing his
book, while his view outside to the garden would have become increasingly
obscured. There is an interesting parallel here between his intellectual growth
and his body being overtaken by its own ‘weeds’ mentioned in the scripted diary
extracts: his loss of eyesight and worsening arthritis.
A courtyard garden at Galileo's former home in Arcetri, Florence
Weeds near the entrance to Dreamland's car park
Aside from Galileo’s physical
condition, the writing of Two New Sciences would certainly have been
worrisome endeavour. All of Galileo’s publications had been banned under order
of the Catholic Church, and being under house arrest with armed guards lurking
meant that anything potentially illicit would have had to be kept very
secretive.
Later on in the walk, you
navigate a narrow back-street with tall buildings on one side and a high fence on the other; a road apparently used most often for delivering and loading goods. It’s
a place evidently not designed for you to dwell in.
Here, the words in the audio diary draw
comparisons between this discomfort and compression you feel when physically walking and
Galileo’s own anxiety, as he prepares to release his illicit work out into the world.
In the words of the audio, ambiguous
references are made to objects like CCTV cameras, back entrances, invisible
onlookers and hidden doorways in the audiowalk's Margate locations, which become symbols of
these themes of surveillance and secrets, ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’.
Streetview image of Hall by the Sea Road, Margate
Ultimately, though, Galileo’s
story is one of his work transcending the confined spaces and times in which he
lived. As a form of epilogue to the events leading to the publication of Two
New Sciences, I chose to set a sixth and final scene on Margate beach.
Here, the view over the sea to
the horizon, the coastal breeze, sound of road traffic and sensation of sand
under your feet are called upon in the script as symbols of this transcendence: the passing of time, movement between distant places, and the power of
imagination and motion to connect everything.
Margate beach
These are just some of the
intricate, enigmatic connections that the audiowalk’s script draws between the
landscapes of Dreamland in the 21st century and Galileo’s life in 17th-century
Florence.
Alongside these broader themes of
enclosure, inaccessibility, creativity, growth, surveillance, secrets, motion
and imagination, there are many other moments when individual details along the
route of the walk are called upon to create figurative, symbolic links between
events in Galileo’s life and your immediate surroundings.
I won’t name these explicitly as
they are designed to be stumbled upon to achieve their effect. But hidden in
the script are references to particular signage, graffiti, road markings,
security infrastructure, photographs, historic wall lettering, paving, and a
familiar Margate sound.
A final feature of the script
worth noting is the series of dates associated with the diary entries
you find. You’ll notice that no numbered days are given, only named dates such
as ‘Ash Wednesday’, ‘Pentecost’ and ‘Epiphany’.
In historic records, none of the
events described in Galileo's story have exact dates. Usually only years are given,
and occasionally times of year.
This ambiguity gave me the
licence to choose dates within a rough timescale that reflect the symbolic significance
these events had within Galileo’s life. In particular, these are all
important dates on the Christian calendar. This was a nod to the fact that
Galileo was a Catholic, who did not see his scientific findings as incompatible
with his faith.
I also figured that a 21st-century
listener would struggle to form any kind of impression from a specific date like
‘August 12th 1635’, while these holy days still have importance
today. More curious listeners might recognise this level of detail in the work
and choose to investigate further, also becoming more alert to other subtle,
intricate features of the work.
The next post in
this series discusses how I narrated the scripted diary entries, recording the audio
and editing it to upload to the A Different LENS map.
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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home
The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.
However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).
To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.
Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.
Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.
The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.
If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.
On 25th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.
Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.
In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.
More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.
----------------------------
With most location-based media,
we are used to experiencing content that directly relates to the place we’re
in. This is one of the unique qualities of these media – that you can draw on
the characteristics of a precise location to tell stories, provoke play,
educate, inform and entertain people in an intimate, ‘immersive’ way.
But we can think about these
affordances in a different way. Creating an engaging piece of location-based
media isn’t just about referring to things you can sense in your
surroundings, but the content being enhanced by them in some way.
I asked myself: how can the
telling of Galileo’s story be brought to life through the environments
of 21st-century Margate?
In answering this question, the
key example I turned to for inspiration was a video game called Dear Esther.
In Dear Esther, you navigate the
bleak, rugged landscape of a Hebridean island, listening to a man reading
letters to his deceased wife, Esther. While some of what you hear seems
connected to details found on the island, many of the events described by the unreliable
narrator evidently happened elsewhere. Locations such as Wolverhampton, Damascus
and the M5 between Exeter and Bristol are named, as well as a host of
characters and incidents detached from what you can see and hear in your
environment.
Example of dis-locative narration in Dear Esther
It becomes apparent that the
island’s landscapes may be as imaginary as they are real; taking on figurative
– symbolic and metaphorical – roles in the player’s journey through a story of
grief, loss and redemption.
Symbolic landscapes in Dear Esther
With this form of storytelling,
it matters less whether you find all the possible connections between your
surroundings and the overarching story. What’s most important is that when you
do make a connection, your relationship with the storyworld becomes that much
more intimate because you’ve made the connection yourself.
The role of a narrator isn’t to guide
you but to offer narrative promptsthat invite you
to uncover this emotional resonance in your surroundings.
I wondered whether Dear Esther’s
figurative approach might be similarly effective in a location-based narrative
– as a way of connecting distant places and times through symbolism and
metaphor, while ensuring that the experience was still embedded in the player’s
navigation of their physical surroundings.
It struck me that this approach would
be a thematic fit for Dreamland, as a place which pulls on the imagination in both
name and practice, despite currently being inaccessible.
But what connection could I draw
between Dreamland and the actual events of Galileo’s life?
The answer, appropriately, came in
thinking about Galileo’s deteriorating sight. I started to conceptualise his
growing blindness as a transition from seeing things literally to only being
able to picture them in the mind – a journey towards entering his own
‘Dreamland’.
Coupled with his struggle to
overcome the significant personal challenges that writing Two New Sciences
presented, this period of Galileo’s life appeared to connect with the notion of
‘dreams’ in more ways than one.
The next challenge would be to determine
the specific locations around Dreamland that would feature in my work.
The webapp we used to host and
map the projects in A Different LENS, CGeoMap, gave some basic location
specifications to work with. I knew that each point had to be at least 40
metres apart. I also knew that I could make certain points invisible on the map
until the user reaches the relevant location.
To be sure I’d finish making the
audiowalk in time for the project launch, I also knew I wanted to keep the
number of points to a maximum of 5 or 6; focusing on making these entries as
evocative as possible. Given that my story would be reflecting a series of
events in Galileo’s life, it made sense for the points to be linear in their
organisation.
The Gates to Dreamland points on the A Different LENS map
After that, the decision on
locations was purely a creative one, aside from the usual caveats of the sites
being publicly accessible and the walk not being too long.
In thinking about the
inaccessibility of Dreamland at the time and the circumstances surrounding
Galileo’s house arrest, I was particularly drawn to gates as symbolising
some kind of passage or journey, while denying that passage at the same time.
They are physical obstacles, yet provoke you to imagine what is beyond them;
liminal spaces between here and there, inside and outside, near and far.
Dreamland has two main entrances
for visitors: from the car park and from Hall by the Sea Road.
However, a quick search on Google
Streetview revealed a few smaller gates dotted around the perimeter of the
park. Including the two main entrances, these entrances are labelled as Gates A
to E. Conveniently, they are also quite evenly spaced and all separated by gaps
of more than 40 metres.
Dreamland's Gate A on Google Streetview
Running with the idea of these
five gates being the points for my audiowalk, I then attempted to decipher
connections between what could be found at these sites and the events in
Galileo’s life during the writing of Two New Sciences.
I created a design document that
charted the arc of Galileo’s story, from returning to Florence under house
arrest, to the publishing of Two New Sciences. This was divided into
five key story beats, which later became six.
In the same document, I then
listed all the physical features I could identify at each of Dreamland’s gates
and along the routes between them. Due to the pandemic restrictions, I was
unable to visit the sites in person, so I relied on close observation of Google
Streetview images.
Finally, I attempted to find
connections between the beats of Galileo’s story and the physical
characteristics I’d noted for each of the sites.
The key to this task was to
identify the emotional resonance of the events in Galileo’s life that
I’d pinpointed. Once I’d done that, I could think about which details at each
site might chime with this ambiance in ways that were compelling and reflective
of the wider themes I wanted to explore.
I go into this
process in more detail in this series’ next blog post, where I’ll be discussing
the process of creating the script for The Gates to Dreamland.
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How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home
The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.
However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).
To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.
Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.
Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.
The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.
If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.
For the past three months –
alongside my PhD fieldwork, various conference and event contributions, and running
my location-based storytelling game Canterbury
in 3 Words – I’ve been working hard on a brand-new creative project.
Today sees the launch of my
locative audiowalk game, The Gates to Dreamland.
Set around the boundaries of the
Dreamland amusement park in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how
interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can
connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance
within our own lives.
The walk tells the story of Italian
scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book: the
obstacles he faced, his eyesight and bodily health failing, and the changes in
perspective that entailed.
Here’s a short blurb:
It’s 1634, and Italian scientist
Galileo Galilei is under house arrest for heresy, after illustrating that the
Earth revolves around the Sun. Bodily health and eyesight failing, he must
transcend his situation to continue his scientific work. Follow Galileo’s
journey as he attempts to write one final book that will change the study of
science forever. A journey that will transform his perspective on the world,
connecting distant places and times through imagination and motion.
Find echoes of Galileo’s words at the
gates to Dreamland. Six lost diary entries that reveal a path forward – a
process of overcoming adversity and encountering your surroundings with a
different lens. The recordings will appear on the map as you approach the
locations of each gate. Your journey begins at Dreamland’s Gate A.
The Gates to Dreamland was made
as part of A Different LENS, a
collaborative story mapping project set in Margate, Kent. It explores how we
overcome challenging events in our lives, through responses by several
Kent-based artists to the writing of visually-impaired authors. Material
produced by the artists for the map engages with methods of making the
inaccessible accessible through creative means. The map can be accessed via
mobile – with users navigating its content by walking at the relevant sites in
Margate – or via PC for those unable to walk there physically.
Soon, I’ll be posting here about
how The Gates to Dreamland was made, delving into how my contribution to A Different LENS came
about, the ideas and inspirations behind the design, the process of creating
the audiowalk material itself, and how it connects to my other work.
The
project is also likely to develop further. Due to time limitations and my other work
commitments, I wasn’t able to incorporate music and soundscaping into the audio
as I had planned. Eventually, I’m aiming to compose short pieces to complement the
spoken words you hear on the walk.
But for now, you can enjoy this
first version of The Gates to Dreamland yourself by visiting the A Different
LENS map here, on mobile or
PC.
This audiowalk game is primarily designed
to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load
the map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and
you must discover the remainder for yourself by finding the rest of Dreamland’s
gates in person.
This way, you can gauge the full
extent of connections between the words you hear and what you can sense in
person at the locations. The trip would also give you the opportunity to explore
Margate further and enjoy the other artists’ contributions to the map for A
Different LENS.
When accessing the map via PC, none
of the entries are hidden from view. If you navigate to the relevant locations for
my walk in Google Streetview, you could explore the relationships between what you hear
and what you observe; perhaps even the place where you’re listening from.
But if you’re local, or if there’s
a chance you could be in Margate anytime over the coming months, then I would
strongly encourage you to experience The Gates to Dreamland in situ and explore
the town using the A Different LENS map.
One final thing to mention.
As part of A Different LENS,
walking artist and writer Sonia Overall
is coordinating a series of Distance
Drifts: synchronised walks that take place on Twitter each Sunday at 10am.
Using the hashtag #DistanceDrift,
Sonia will be posting prompts for playful walking that connect to the different
entries on the map for A Different LENS.
You can participate in
#DistanceDrift wherever you are, and walk in whatever way is possible for you –
indoors, outdoors, on wheels, assisted, etc. If you can, share stories and
images of your responses to the prompts using the hashtag.
This Sunday (27th
September), #DistanceDrift will include a response to The Gates to
Dreamland! It would be wonderful to see some of you there on Twitter.
I must end with a huge thanks to Elspeth (Billie) Penfold for her
sterling work in curating A Different LENS and inviting me to participate. It
is not an easy job to coordinate between several individual artists, organisations
and event organisers, arrange regular group meetings, write (and succeed!) with
funding applications, advertise the project, upload and edit creative content,
and contribute to the map creatively herself. I’m particularly grateful for her
patience as I juggled my contribution with my academic work and other commitments,
and her persistent reminders to have fun with the project.
Thanks and congratulations also
to the other participating artists for their inspiring contributions and
helpful discussion in earlier stages of the project. And of course, we’re all indebted
to Arts Council England, Margate NOW 2020, Margate Bookie and Kent County
Council for supporting and funding this project.
The video embedded above is the recorded presentation I gave at the 20 Years of Seeing with GPS symposium, hosted online by the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London on 12th June 2020. This event marked the 20-year anniversary of GPS availability in the public realm, asking and reflecting upon how GPS has affected how we see the world.
My presentation discussed the potential of location-based games as platforms for storytelling about place, drawing on findings from testing my own game Canterbury in 3 Words, which I developed as part of my PhD fieldwork. You can read the words from this presentation below.
I’d like to thank Claire Reddleman and Mike Duggan for organising such a thought-provoking and inspiring event, and for persevering with hosting the symposium online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (and despite numerous technical challenges). I'd also like to thank my fellow presenters and those who attended the symposium for being part of such an illuminating, critical and creative discussion around GPS.
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GPS, and the locative media that
operate using this technology, are often upheld as an example of how the
specificity of place has been re-established in our globalised, ‘digital age’.
With the internet’s capacity for information sharing, and mobile devices that
let us access and attach information to locations in situ, it’s been suggested
that locative media can intensify our relationships with the places we inhabit.
In talking about ways of seeing
with GPS, I’m going to talk particularly about seeing playfully, in the
form of designing and playing location-based games. I’m going to discuss the
possibilities and challenges of these media for re-purposing instrumental
applications of GPS towards providing platforms for diverse narratives of
place. In the process, I’ll be suggesting that location-based games offer
illuminating vantage points for understanding the affordances of locative technologies
and platforms, as the practices of playful navigation that players adopt articulate
the ways they both enable and inhibit means of attending to place.
I want to begin by highlighting
that for as long as GPS has been open for public use, it’s been used for play. The
first ever geocache was hidden on May 3rd 2000, the day after selective
availability was removed from GPS, which spawned the treasure-hunting game
Geocaching that’s now played worldwide by millions of people. Since then, creative
practitioners have drawn on the specific attributes of GPS to create ludic
experiences centred on various forms of location-awareness. These include games
that play with GPS’s accuracy as well as its inconsistencies, its relationships
with forms of digital mapping, geo-tagging information shared via the internet,
and the pervasiveness of its everyday usage in the Global North.
In doing this, location-based
games and other playful applications of GPS have, to varying degrees, re-attuned
awareness and reflection on locative technologies and the infrastructures that
enable them, at a time when their pervasiveness has arguably made them less
visible. At the same time, these media have been harnessed to shift modes of
attention towards our surroundings in “sensory-inscribed” ways, as Jason
Farman puts it. Examining location-based games can therefore be fruitful for
apprehending the dual embodied and representational processes through which
locations become meaningful to us, and the technologies with which these experiences
unfold.
Traditionally, play has been
understood as a sphere separate from everyday life; a magic circle entered voluntarily
where special rules apply. Location-based games, however, are an example of pervasive
play - one in which the magic circle is expanded to incorporate spaces and
times of the everyday. The transformative potential of these games, it’s
argued, is in how they draw on the ‘meaningful inefficiencies’ of play rules to
cultivate new forms of awareness towards, and interaction with, the places we
inhabit and their associated rhythms.
When it comes to the stories
of place, we can observe how location-based games build on navigational
practices fostered in earlier pervasive media such as audiowalks, which use
movement through space as “narrativizing” practice. This close relationship
between navigation and narrative can be explored further as locative media draw
together different means of accessing and communicating information, which are
articulated by the participating user.
My research sought to investigate
the potential of location-based games to be both playful and participatory;
telling and eliciting stories of places. But rather than approach this question
by studying finished works, I wanted to learn about the affordances of these
media in practice and in context, where I could access processes and
relationships of production that are typically tacit and less visible. Game
design in particular is highly iterative as a creative process, as you attempt
to configure the contingent ways that people interact with the system you curate.
I wanted to figure out what opportunities and challenges would arise in practically
making a location-based game focused site-specific storytelling, to better
understand how ludic practices of design and play might enable meaningful
engagement with place.
I’m going to discuss this
research here using the example of making Canterbury in 3 Words, a
location-based game I made in my home city of Canterbury using the What3Words
geolocation service.
But first, what is What3Words?
What3Words is a free-to-use, commercial platform and geolocation system that
divides the world into 3-metre squares and gives each one a unique 3-word
address. These 3-word addresses never change, and are determined by an algorithm
that converts GPS coordinates into the What3Words grid, attaching words from a
library of those approved.
The company’s mission is to ‘make
everyone, everything and everywhere easy to find’ – the idea being that it’s
much easier to communicate location by saying three words than reeling off a
list of coordinate digits. This idea came about when a delivery to the
company’s founder ended up in completely the wrong location because a driver
misheard GPS coordinates being relayed over the phone.
Since being founded in 2013, What3Words
has partnered with a growing number of large corporations who make use of their
system for purposes such as logistics and automotive navigation. In the UK, the
service is often recommended to the public by local emergency services, as a
way to quickly and accurately communicate your location in an emergency.
Notably, the company has also partnered with postal services in Mongolia and
Tonga, where What3Words has become the default addressing system in communities
where street addresses never previously existed.
Unsurprisingly, though, this new
method of mapping and locating presents a range of potential issues. What3Words
is owned and managed as a business. The algorithm used to convert GPS
coordinates to 3-word addresses is proprietary rather than open source, and
even free users need to agree to a lengthy set of terms and conditions before
using it. Individuals or organisations wanting to make high-volume use of their
API will have to pay.
The words themselves too can be
problematic. Obviously they’ll have pre-existing cultural associations – that’s
part of why the system is said to aid communication. Users are aware of this
when they spot amusing or opportune combinations of words, and there are whole
forums online dedicated to finding these. But you can imagine how certain
addresses could take on new significance when attached to culturally or
politically sensitive sites.
Language settings are another
factor. What3Words is currently available in 44 languages, however the same
3-metre square will have a completely different address in each different
language, meaning that there’s no direct way to translate between them.
Lastly, geodetic movement can
hinder the accuracy of an addressing system using a static grid. If an object shifts
into a neighbouring square following events like earthquakes, it will have an address
that bears no similarity to its previous one.
With these caveats in mind, as I
was developing my design ideas, I was struck by how evocative the three-word
addresses could be, even though their role on the platform itself is very
instrumental. Addresses like ‘snows.alarm.builds’ almost seemed to suggest
micro-narratives in themselves. Furthermore, as the second address on this
slide shows, there were occasionally uncanny moments of synchronicity between
the addresses and what could be found physically in the locations. It occurred
to me that these combinations of words could potentially be interesting tools
or prompts for storytelling.
I was also struck by the
company’s aim for What3Words to make things ‘easy to find’. I started thinking
about whether being able to find locations easier is actually productive for
apprehending them as places. I wanted to explore the potential of geolocative
platforms for engaging with place beyond the instrumental purpose finding
specific locations.
The idea of a treasure hunt
appealed to me as a type of game that both relies on locating, yet typically entails
a slower, process of navigation that reconfigures forms of attention with your
surroundings. In the process, players adopt a certain critical gaze through
which they notice things about their environment that they weren’t previously
aware of.
I was particularly inspired by
the painted rocks game, which is played in local communities worldwide using
Facebook. Players hide rocks they paint themselves in public places, and other
players post photos with them to show when they’ve been found and rehidden.
What struck me was how embedded it is in the everyday life of local communities,
relying both on people coming across the rocks during their everyday activities
and when doing their daily browsing on Facebook.
Drawing these ideas together, I
devised Canterbury in 3 Words. The game involves sharing stories about places
in Canterbury that use all three words of their addresses on What3Words, as
well as a photograph clue. Other players can then attempt to find the locations
using the information provided and the What3Words app.
The stories are posted on a private
Facebook group, with players commenting on the posts when they find the correct
3-word address used in the story – without giving it away.
In November and December last
year, I tested this game with 15 local people over a period of three weeks.
After monitoring the Facebook group during this time and recording my
observations, I then interviewed 7* of these players in the weeks after the test.
The findings I’m going to talk about now are all based on this period of my
research, though as I’ll explain later, the game has since evolved further.
*(I actually interviewed 8 of these participants; this was a mistake!)
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.
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.
______________________
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.
Click to enlarge
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.
Click to enlarge
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.
______________________
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.
