Time Travel as Wayfinding: Assembling Past and Present in Location-Based Games

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Below is a written version of the paper I presented at the Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop hosted by the Bristol Digital Games Lab on 12th May 2023. In the text below, I have indicated where each slide should be viewed in the embedded PowerPoint above.

I’d like to thank everyone at British Digital Games Lab for making this excellent event happen, in particular Richard Cole for inviting me to participate. I'd also like to thank the other speakers and attendees for contributing to such interesting and rich discussion.     

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(Slide 1)

Hi everyone. I’m Jack Lowe, a post-doctoral research associate at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre. I also design location-based games and I do narrative design for digital games and other media.

(Slide 2)

I’m here to talk about what time travel might mean in the context of location-based games – that is, games in which players’ physical locations and/or actions are incorporated into the gameplay through media interfaces. What does time travel mean in the context of these types of games?

(Slide 3)

Well, I want to start by stating the obvious: we can’t literally be transported back in time, nor can we create perfect emulations of the past through media, no matter how ‘immersive’ they supposedly are.

However, we can literally engage with elements of the historic past in the places we inhabit.

(Slide 4)

Throughout this talk, I’m going to be talking about places as assemblages. Assemblages are relationships between component parts that aren’t stable or fixed. Things can be replaced or displaced, and some things can also remain.

By thinking about places as assemblages, we can grasp how elements of the past remain in the present, but how there are always elements that are changing too – whether they’re material things, meanings or lived practices.

(Slide 5)

I’ve got this quote here from Tim Ingold, an anthropologist who talks about places in this kind of processual way. He says:

“…every place holds within it memories of previous arrivals and departures, as well as expectations of how one may reach it, or reach other places from it. Thus do places enfold the passage of time: they are neither of the past, present or future but all three rolled into one. Endlessly generated through the comings and goings of their inhabitants, they figure not as locations in space but as specific vortices in a current of movement, of innumerable journeys actually made.”

So when I look at this quote, it really makes me feel that places are sites of time travel. They have multiple time periods folded into them, produced by the journeys of the things that assemble in those places.

(Slide 6)

And what I’m here to discuss today is how our engagement with these elements from different time periods depends on how we navigate through places.

In particular, I going to use the concept of wayfinding in this presentation to discuss how we interact with different time periods in location-based games.

Wayfinding is a practice of coming to understand your whereabouts by connecting your movements with the narratives of other journeys made in that place, by you and by other people and things.

But wayfinding isn’t a clear-cut process. Not everyone finding their way through a place will make the same connections.

(Slide 7)

And this is a theme I’m going to be returning to when I talk about how we engage with the past in location-based games.

My aim is to highlight how location-based games present compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of the past and how the past connects with the present through place.

And I’m going to do this by exploring the relationships between navigation and narrative in the design and play of two games I created that directly focus on historic events.

Let me introduce them briefly.

(Slide 8)

The first is The Timekeeper’s Return. The Timekeeper’s Return is a story-based treasure hunt designed for all ages, in which players scan QR codes to discover the hidden histories of locations in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter. The story follows the journey of a time-travelling researcher called Mia Augustina, whose time machine has malfunctioned and trapped her in the past. By interacting with role-playing local businesspeople and using the information they provide, players must find and scan all the QR code ‘triangulation markers’ in the Cathedral Quarter to recalibrate Mia’s time machine and help her return. These QR codes also communicate Mia’s research diaries, sharing the stories of what she has encountered in the past, in those same locations.

(Slide 9)

The second game is The Gates to Dreamland. The Gates to Dreamland is an interactive audiowalk set around the Dreamland Amusement Park in Margate. The player triggers audio diary extracts to be played when they find each of the 5 gates located around Dreamland’s perimeter. These diary extracts describe the journey faced by Italian scientist Galileo, as he attempted to publish his final book. Through symbolic and metaphorical connections to the landscape around Dreamland, the audiowalk explores the obstacles Galileo faced, as he lost his eyesight and his health worsened, and how his perspective on the world changed. It’s ultimately about the power of imagination in changing how you see the world, and it can be played in person or online using Google Streetview.

So now I’ve introduced the games, let’s use this idea of wayfinding to think about how we engage with the past by navigating through places in location-based games.

(Slide 10)

In location-based games, one of the features of how you navigate is that you can generally look and move in any direction that your body allows. You are in control of your body and what you choose to focus on in your surroundings.

This feature is one of the reasons that many digital games and other interactive experiences are considered different when compared to other narrative media like films or books. You have more agency to determine the perspective from which you encounter things happening in the world.

This is called ‘dynamic focalization’.

(Slide 11)

However, in digitally-rendered worlds, designers still have tactics to influence what you pay attention to. They can use visual techniques like lighting and signposting, they can use sound design or they can change the characteristics of the avatar you control. So while it still feels like you have a great deal of agency in where you direct your attention, it is still being manipulated by the designers of the digitally-rendered world.

In location-based games, you engage with a material world using a fleshy body, not an avatar, in a way that isn’t limited by what has been programmed into some software.

But this agency brings with it an awful lot of uncertainty.

(Slide 12)

I’m going to use an example from The Timekeeper’s Return to illustrate this, which was the QR code treasure hunt engaging with hidden histories of Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter.

One of Mia Augustina’s research diaries from the past, communicated through a QR code sticker, referred to the building pictured here. This building was believed to be the inspiration for the house of Mr. Wickfield in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.

When I tested the game, some players misinterpreted that the building being described was the stone tower you can see in the image on the right. To me, it seemed obvious from the positioning of the QR code that the building people would look at would be the white building. As it turned out, players would usually end up focusing on the more intricate, striking features of the stone tower instead. So in the end, I had to change the research diary text to deliberately direct players to look across to the other side of the road, where the relevant building could be seen.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised, though, because this is a common outcome when wayfinding in an unfamiliar setting. I’m sure all of us can recall moments when we’ve been following directions that describe landmarks, or when we’ve looked at the road layout on a map, yet still managed to go the wrong direction because of what we happened to notice at the time, or what we were paying attention to.

(Slide 13)

For Misha Myers, this is one of the particular qualities of mobile media storytelling: that even in a linear story with pre-determined routes, the narrative experience can be “undone by the particularities of ‘just this body in just this place’ at just this time.” Wayfinding is an embodied practice, and each body will have different capacities in different contexts.

Okay, so the embodied navigation that people do in location-based games introduces contingency to the experience, which can affect how players engage with historic elements in their environment.

(Slide 14)

But what happens if you lean into this contingency? What happens if you accept the possibility that people might not notice certain historic details, or will actively ignore information connecting to the past?

This is what I experimented with in The Gates to Dreamland, which was the locative audiowalk about the Italian scientist Galileo.

Whether you’re playing in person in Margate or using Google Streetview, when players listen to the audio diaries describing events in Galileo’s life, as a designer I had no way of knowing what players might be looking at or paying attention to at the time.

For example, one player described how, at this point in the experience, they decided to use Google Streetview to zoom in on the person pushing the pram. As you can see, that’s just one detail visible in the 360-degree view of this location.

(Slide 15)

But rather than deliberately directing players’ attention to particular things, like I did with The Timekeeper’s Return, instead I decided to write audio diary scripts that were saturated with references to all sorts of things in your surroundings. Even though Galileo was living in 17^th-century Florence, I could make connections to present-day Margate using metaphors and symbolism.

When I interviewed players about the game, they all described how what they focused on completely changed the connections they drew between Galileo’s experiences and the area of Margate they were navigating. They might only notice maybe a maximum of 40% of the references in the audio diaries, because of what they happened to be paying attention to at the time. But that’s fine, because when they did notice them, it was they themselves who had uncovered that link to the past. And often they would perceive connections I never even intended too.

This then helped them to understand the wider themes of the experience: about the power of the imagination in creating connections across different time periods and different parts of the world. Perception itself is a form of agency.

By actively drawing on the contingency of wayfinding as an embodied practice, the game demonstrated that there are no stable, unchanging understandings of the past. The past is always encountered in a present, lived context.

(Slide 16)

So we can see that the relationship between past and present isn’t a neat one.

And this is clearly shown by places. In all places, some elements of the past remain, others don’t, some are detectable, some aren’t, some we know about and some we don’t.

In location-based games that engage with the past, the aim of designers is to find forms of navigation that assemble interesting or compelling connections between the past and the present in the places people inhabit.

(Slide 17)

The Timekeeper’s Return was all about the hidden histories of Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter, and the excitement of following the journey of time-travelling researcher Mia Augustina as she encountered them.         

Some of these histories are still visible in the environment in some form – players just needed the opportunity to notice them. In this image, the stones you can see embedded in the brickwork are the last remains of the Burgate, a gate in Canterbury’s city wall that existed in various forms from the Romans until 1822. Simply through the placement of a QR code at this location, the attention of players who successfully found the sticker was drawn to this material feature.

(Slide 18)

For other histories, however, there is no obvious physical remnant for people to find. For example, while Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter was extensively bombed during the Baedecker Raids of WW2, many of the bombed areas have since been rebuilt.

In these situations, connections with the past must be made in other ways.

One technique is to use the material features that do exist as a reference point. For example, referring to the heights and distances between things in players’ surroundings to indicate the scale of something no longer there.

For the WW2 bombing example, one of the QR code research diaries draws players’ attention to a street where the entirety of one side of the street was flattened by the bombing, while all the buildings on the other side remained intact. While the bombed side of the street has now been rebuilt, I could still use this comparison between the two sides of the street to demonstrate the extent of the destruction.

In The Timekeeper’s Return, then, wayfinding by using historic details in the story and its comparison to the present-day landscape gave players dramatic agency in how they assembled connections to the past.

(Slide 19)

But in The Gates to Dreamland, where the history being explored happened somewhere else entirely (17^th-century Florence), how could players’ navigation of the environment engage with the past in a compelling way?

The answer was to draw figurative and symbolic connections between material features in the player’s surroundings and Galileo’s situation, as described in the audio diaries.

At one of the gates to Dreamland, between the metal bars, the amusement park’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance. The words from the scripted audio diary at this location imagine how Galileo’s first action, when returning to his villa under house arrest in 1634, was to climb straight to the highest window of the house. Here, he gazes upon the familiar view of the Torre del Gallo – a tower in Florence – but his sight problems render the view inaccessible.

Here, the listener is invited to draw a figurative connection between the inaccessibility of Dreamland’s landmarks and that of Galileo, in being house-bound and increasingly visually impaired.

Of course, there are slippages in this process. In discussing mobile media storytelling, Misha Myers describes the breakages and detours that occur when participants ‘move between the fault lines of two presents’ – one represented by the media, and one inhabited by the participant.

What’s compelling about this process of juxtaposition, however, is that it provides gaps for players to fill in.

(Slide 20)

This can lead to all sorts of unexpected impressions too.

For example, one of the people who played The Gates to Dreamland using Google Streetview decided to play with the platform’s date range feature as they were navigating. As they witnessed the Margate landscape change over time, their interpretation of the audio diaries shifted depending on the version of Margate they navigated through.        

Wayfinding is ultimately a propositional process: proposing a way through the world by finding connections between the diverse range of information you encounter, however jarring or conflicting it may be.

In these location-based games, players navigated the fault lines between present-day contexts and information from the past, and then used this to construct an understanding of place and its relationship with time.

(Slide 21)

The juxtaposition of a mediated history with an embodied encounter of a place means that the impressions of the past that players form typically aren’t simple, singular narratives. There are all sorts of influences and perspectives that shape what people perceive about these histories.

Often, players of these two games would report how their perceptions of places and their history changed as a result of playing.

For those who played The Timekeeper’s Return, probably the two most common responses to the game were that a) they became newly aware of historic features in the Cathedral Quarter that they didn’t know were there, and b) that they learnt about the history behind landmarks which they encountered on an everyday basis (as this quote shows).

(Slide 22)

In The Gates to Dreamland, which was often played remotely using Streetview during the pandemic, the experience provoked interesting relationships with memory. Galileo’s history became coloured by people’s existing knowledges and impressions of Margate, as well as the version of Margate they encountered on Streetview. Likewise, their impressions of Margate became influenced by Galileo’s story. Suddenly, Margate became seen as a place connected to many other entities across space and time. The understanding of the past that resulted was deeply hybrid; an impression that cut across many different influences.

(Slide 23)

However, there’s an interesting question about authenticity here, which ties to some of the discussions we had during the last Bristol Digital Games Lab event. Does it matter that people are engaging with Galileo’s history in a context that’s completely foreign to the one he actually lived in? Does it matter that the diaries aren’t Galileo’s own words, even though they’re based on academic research and evidence from the historic record?

(Slide 24)

This is a debate that goes far beyond the scope of this presentation, but what came out consistently from my interviews with those who played these games was a heightened awareness of the range of possible connections with the past that can be made – how multiple impressions of a place and its past can come to define a site. Players recognised that one person’s impression of Galileo’s journey, or one of the Cathedral Quarter’s histories, would be constructed completely different from somebody else’s, depending on all sorts of contextual factors. In The Timekeeper’s Return, in particular, players frequently referred to a sense of community being generated. This collective, extroverted sense of place came about as players engaged with a wide range of historic information shared by several role-playing local businesspeople in order to navigate through the game area.

Which brings me to the final point of this presentation. Wayfinding is an intersubjective practice – it unfolds through the relationships between things, rather than depending on a single person’s intentions.

And the same thing is happening with these games. Impressions of the past unfold through the continual wiring and re-wiring of connections between materials, meanings and practices that people encounter as they navigate through places.

(Slide 25)

So overall, what can we say about time travel in location-based games?

Well, location-based games as media forms are defined by relationships between navigation and narrative. They’re about the synergy between how you find a way through the world and the story of what unfolds.

In location-based games that engage with the past, different forms of navigation are curated to connect what players encounter in the present-day world with historic events.

This happens through a process of wayfinding, which I’ve argued is an embodied, propositional and intersubjective process.

It’s embodied in how players have agency in the ways they move and pay attention to the things they encounter, to feel their way through the world.

It’s propositional in how there are ‘gaps’ or ‘fault lines’ between past events and what players encounter during the game, which players have the opportunity to fill with their ideas and imaginations.

And it’s intersubjective, in how the impressions of the past players form are created by drawing relations between multiple paths and perspectives.

By arguing that time travel in location-based games is akin to wayfinding, then, I’m suggesting that players’ interaction with the past isn’t neat or uncomplicated.

Rather, location-based games present compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of the past, by demonstrating the myriad ways that past and present are continually assembled in place.

(Slide 26)

Upcoming Public Appearances in Bristol

In the next few weeks, I’m sharing creative and academic work as part of three different Friday events in Bristol.

Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk, Friday 28^th April, 1pm

Every Friday, the Pervasive Media Studio offers free, informal lunchtime talks from people sharing projects, process, ideas and provocations around pervasive media and creative technology.

On Friday 28^th April, I’m presenting a Lunchtime Talk titled Designing Place-Based Games. This talk will be sharing practical insights into designing games that engage with place, drawing on findings from my PhD. However, it will also be informed by my more recent creative projects and my earlier MA research on creating a sense of place in video games. It will consider what focusing on ‘place’ means for the play experience and how different design techniques can influence these experiences across digital and non-digital media.

Join us online on YouTube Live, or in the Pervasive Media Studio on 28th April at 1pm. Pervasive Media Studio is located within Watershed in the city centre on Bristol’s historic harbourside.

First Friday, Pervasive Media Studio, Friday 5^th May, 5 – 6pm

Then, on Friday 5^th May from 5pm, I will be sharing work in the Pervasive Media Studio again. This time, my team and I will be sharing our new narrative puzzle game, Interment, for people to play and learn more about as part of First Friday.

First Friday is a monthly social event open to anyone. These events are somewhere between the last meeting of the week and the first event of your weekend. You might meet an artist or an engineer, a school teacher or a city leader. It is a place to connect with someone you might not otherwise meet, and hear about stuff you didn’t already know. All are welcome: from inside and outside the city, online or in the Watershed building.

Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop, Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bristol, Friday 12^th May, 9.30am – 5pm

Lastly, on Friday 12^th May, I will be presenting and taking part in the Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop, hosted by Bristol Digital Game Lab.

This workshop will bring together speakers from the Virtual Reality Oracle project team and from across academic disciplines and industry to explore how users and producers of both immersive experiences and historical video games conceive of journeying to the past.

My presentation in this workshop is titled Time Travel as Wayfinding: Assembling Past and Present in Location-based Games. Here’s a summary of what I’ll be talking about:

As a so-called ‘immersive’ media form that typically centres upon people’s live physical locations and/or actions, how can location-based games connect us to different time periods? In this talk, I chart how relationships with the past emerge through the ways designers and players of location-based games engage with place. Drawing on two location-based games I developed and tested as part of a practice-based PhD project, which both focus on historic events, I reframe the concept of time travel away from being ‘transported through time’ using immersive media. Instead, I understand it as a process of wayfinding: a propositional and intersubjective form of navigation through which people assemble impressions of a place (and its past). I show how designers and players of location-based games negotiate the contingency and multiplicity inherent in live, physical, everyday contexts of location-based gameplay to produce diverse, complex and insecure impressions of historic scenarios. Ultimately, I suggest that the significance of location-based games as media for connecting with the past is in the relationships between navigation and narrative that are performed by designers and players. These relationships do not enable mimetic representations or experiences of the past, but create compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating notions of what went before, what exists today and how both are interconnected in place. 

It would be lovely to meet those with shared interests at any of these events. Do get in touch if you want any more information.

YouTube Video: Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games

The video above was produced by me for the Digital Geographies Research Group's Work in Progress YouTube series. The series shares recent or current work being undertaken by researchers on a wide range of topics that connect geography and the digital.

This video briefly summarises findings I made from my PhD research, outlining the key ways that the development and play of location-based games engages with place (where a place, broadly speaking, is a meaningful location). I explain how location-based games are designed to tap into the close relationship between how you navigate an environment and how you perceive the 'story' of it as a place.

DGRG Work in Progress YouTube Series: Spring Showcase 2022

For the past two years, I have served as Postgraduate Representative on the committee of the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG), a research group of the RGS-IBG focused on the relationship between geography and the digital.

Working together with fellow Postgraduate Representative Daisy Curtis, and Events Co-ordinator Maxwell Mutanda, one of the main innovations I have overseen during my time on the DGRG committee is the creation of our YouTube channel. As well as hosting recorded video content from events like our Annual Symposium, the channel is home to our Work in Progress series.

This series consists of short videos between 2 and 5 minutes in length, aiming to communicate recent or current work being undertaken by researchers on a wide range of topics that connect geography and the digital. Topics can include emerging research ideas, approaches to research methodology, research findings, approaches to teaching digital geographies and discussion of research outputs.

Through this series, we want to promote the fascinating, diverse work being done in digital geographies throughout the academic calendar and across the globe, developing our research community further.

By keeping the videos concise, our aim is that making them will require limited preparation and time commitment, helping to ease participation from postgraduates, early career researchers and those with caring commitments, for example. The short video format also makes this content highly shareable, helping contributors to communicate their ideas in a digestible way that can reach a wide range of audiences.            

Towards the end of last year and early this year, we announced a new call for contributions to the Work in Progress series. These videos would make up our 2022 Spring Showcase. I’m very pleased to say that this new batch of videos launched two weeks ago, beginning with a beautifully edited video by Jude Jabali (UCL) on the relationship between digital media and the built environment in the redeveloped area of Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea, London.

Yesterday, we published our second video of the Spring Showcase, featuring Dr. Jamie Halliwell (Manchester Metropolitan University) discussing how fan and sexual identities are expressed within the digital ecosystem of Eurovision fan spaces.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing videos on topics including digital privacy during COVID-19 and the influence of GIS (geographical information systems) on economic geographies. I will also be contributing a video to the series, discussing findings from my PhD research on how people engage with place through location-based games.

New videos are added to the series every fortnight. Subscribe to the DGRG YouTube channel to be notified whenever a new video is released. You can also follow updates from the research group on Twitter @digital_RGS. We have some exciting plans to develop new ways to engage with digital geographies research in 2022, so look out for more announcements soon from the DGRG.

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.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Future Directions

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On 25^th 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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When I first agreed to get involved with A Different LENS, I was approaching my contribution as a side project to my PhD research. 

Indeed, I had only just launched Canterbury in 3 Words – a project made specifically in response to my PhD research questions – when I received the brief for A Different LENS. The latter was therefore my opportunity to keep the creative juices flowing, connect with other artists and gain experience in producing another kind of locative digital media art, alongside my PhD work.

It wasn’t until late in the development of The Gates to Dreamland when I realised that my contribution to A Different LENS had been answering those same PhD research questions all along, albeit from a different angle.   

The Gates to Dreamland was fundamentally concerned with the processes through which places become meaningful to us. And being a form of playful locative media that tells a story, I found myself making many of the same considerations as I had done for other projects during the PhD.

These included how to account for the diverse things and processes that make places what they are; how to manage the difficulties of designing for physical locations that can change without warning; and how to make interacting with places using locative and playful media something that is evocative and interesting.

The project seemed too relevant not to incorporate into my PhD research.

So once The Gates to Dreamland launched, I began considering what kinds of material I could gather and analyse to produce useful findings I could write about in my PhD thesis.                        

Fortunately, I am pretty rigorous when it comes to documenting the process behind any creative work I do. I already had numerous design documents, notes and other original files that I could use in my analysis.

But I knew it would also be valuable to discuss the work with other people, to gauge their responses to the project and its relationship with place.

I identified two groups of people who I felt could provide important insights: collaborators in A Different LENS who tackled the same design brief as me, and members of the public who were willing to test the audiowalk and give me feedback.

Opportunities to talk with some of the other contributing artists arose after the opening of A Different LENS for Margate NOW 2020. The project was featured in Sound Walk September, an annual global festival held online to celebrate audiowalks, and as a result we were invited to host a ‘café’ event with Walk Listen Create. We ran this as a ‘Long Table’, where all of the participating artists spoke about their projects as if talking at a dinner party, while attendees could openly ask questions and discuss the work with us.                 

After this more performative event, a group of us then took part in an ‘after party’, where we chatted with each other about how we found the process of taking part in A Different LENS. This allowed me to ask each contributing artist more targeted questions about their experiences in responding to the project brief.             

Alongside this group discussion, I organised a separate conversation with the project curator Elspeth Penfold, who incidentally also wanted to interview me about A Different LENS for her MA research. In the end, the 90-minute discussion we shared left us both with plenty to work with.

As for feedback from people actually trying The Gates to Dreamland, over November and December 2020 I ran a handful of tests with some really great people who volunteered to take part. Due to the pandemic, all of these people participated online using Streetview, with the A Different LENS webapp open on a separate browser tab. After completing the walk, I then interviewed the testers for 30 minutes about their experiences.

I’m pleased to say that the feedback I’ve received so far has been very positive. It was heartening to hear all the connections the testers identified between the areas around Dreamland and the events described in the audio diaries, which were based on Galileo’s life in 17^th-century Florence. They picked up on lots of the key themes and ideas I wanted to explore in the work and praised the writing for being engaging and evocative. The testers were also complimentary about my voice performances and the audio quality in general.                      

Alongside this positive feedback, I was grateful to get some constructive comments that could help to shape the future of The Gates to Dreamland.

There were some useful suggestions of small technical changes that might improve the experience for different kinds of participants, such as raising the overall volume of the audio for those without headphones. Many of these ideas were tweaks that can be made relatively easily.

However, the testers also offered some interesting thoughts on how remote participation in the walk via Streetview could be developed further.

I was fully aware before testing that the online-only version of the walk was not a seamless experience. The Gates to Dreamland was primarily designed to be completed in Margate, so simulating the walk via an internet browser was always going to be a compromise.                                          

The testers still found the format effective, though, and wondered whether there could be an opportunity to make a more bespoke online version of the walk.

This would likely involve integrating the audio diaries and navigation via Streetview into a single platform, creating a single, accessible place (e.g. website or app) where people anywhere in the world could access the walk online at any point in the future.

It was also suggested that the online version of the walk could include ambient sound and/or music. This is something I would’ve liked to do for the original version if I had more time, and is certainly a feature I’d be interested in working on for any future versions.

While writing my PhD thesis will prevent me from working further on the project over the coming months, I’ll certainly be thinking about what options are available to take these ideas further.

In the meantime, I’d still be delighted if anybody reading this wanted to try the current online version of The Gates to Dreamland.

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. This is the start of the walk, and the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow.

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 in Streetview, 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.

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.

Before I wrap up, I’m delighted to tell you about one special piece of positive feedback relating to this project.

In January, we learnt that A Different LENS received an honourable mention at the Sound Walk September 2020 Awards! In total, there were 50 different soundwalk projects that were submitted to the event, which were narrowed down to a shortlist of 13 for the awards. To not only be shortlisted but also to receive an honourable mention is a huge credit to everyone involved in the project, and it made me very proud to have contributed myself.

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To finish off this series of posts exploring how The Gates to Dreamland was made, I’d just like to thank a few people who made all of this possible.

First and foremost, Elspeth Penfold, for her sterling work in curating A Different LENS and for inviting me to contribute to the project. I’ve mentioned all the different jobs Elspeth took on in this role previously, but I can now add organising the post-launch events and chatting with me about her curation of the project to the list.

I’d like to thank the other artists who contributed to A Different LENS for their valuable advice, ideas and the numerous conversations we shared that have helped me to make – and make sense of – The Gates to Dreamland.

Thank you to Arts Council England, Margate NOW, Kent County Council and the Margate Bookie for funding and supporting A Different LENS.

And finally, many thanks to those who have tested The Gates to Dreamland and taken the time to share your impressions with me. Your contributions have been a huge help for my PhD research, and will help to shape how the project develops in the future.

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.

Location-Based Games and Place: A YouTube Playlist

On 26^th August, I took part in the 2020 RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Twitter Conference.

This conference was organised after many academic events were postponed or cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that postgraduate geographers have had limited opportunities to share and receive feedback on their work, as well as connecting with other scholars.

For this conference, participants were asked to present their research in 5 tweets. This meant not only adhering to the 280-character limit for each tweet, but also finding creative ways to demonstrate research findings using images, videos, GIFs, emojis, and more.       

As I’m approaching the final year of my PhD, when I’ll be writing up what I’ve found from the past couple of years of research, I thought that the most useful approach to this task would be to think through how I’ll be structuring my research findings in my thesis.

For my conference tweets, I decided to make three short videos (3-4 minutes each), outlining what I’ve learnt about the significance of location-based games for thinking about how people experience place in today’s digitally-mediated world. These draw on examples from my practice-based PhD fieldwork, for which I have been making and testing location-based games myself.

Each video focuses thematically on a particular set of research questions, design challenges and observations I have encountered during my research on location-based games, and connects to a substantive chapter of my thesis:

Interfacing Multiplicity: How can location-based games account for, and engage with, this diversity of embodied, discursive and material elements that make places meaningful? And how is this multiplicity, and the platforms used to interface it, experienced by players?

Bounding Contingency: How can developers of location-based games negotiate the limitations, specificities and contingencies that come with designing games set in physical locations? And how do players themselves negotiate these affordances; how does the playing of games set in physical locations enable people to engage with place in particular ways?

Structuring Feeling: How can we design location-based games that make the process of interacting with a place engaging, meaningful and evocative? What kinds of unique experiences and subjectivities might emerge from the gameplay?

I have now shared these videos as a playlist on YouTube called ‘Location-Based Games and Place’, which you can watch below.

Many thanks to the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum team for designing such an innovative conference format and making it run so smoothly. It was inspiring to see a great variety of geographical research presented so creatively on Twitter. Thanks also to those who connected with me during the event by discussing our research and asking/answering questions.

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.