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 going to delve 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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It was back in May when I first
heard from Elspeth (Billie) Penfold, the curator of A Different LENS.
I had only just launched Canterbury in 3 Words, a location-based storytelling game
played using the What3Words app. But after following Billie on Twitter, she got in touch to
say that her and the other artists involved in A Different LENS had been talking
about my work.
Identifying some connections between my game and what A Different LENS aimed to achieve, she asked if I’d be interested in getting involved, sending
me a project brief and arranging a phone call with me shortly afterward.
The brief struck some promising
chords immediately: artists contributing to a widely-accessible digital map
that would lead participants on creative walks around different sites in
Margate. I could see clear links to my interests and prior work with
locative media, the walking arts and site-specific storytelling, as well as the
potential for playful contributions.
What I found challenging about the brief, however, was that contributing artists had to respond to a piece of
writing by a blind or visually-impaired author in their entries for the A Different LENS map.
When searching online, I found
that many of the most famous blind writers had already been chosen
by other artists on the project. I also wasn’t aware that any of the more
obscure literature I’d read had been written by people with visual impairments.
So I decided to expand my search
beyond just ‘writers’ who were blind. And that’s when I found that Galileo
Galilei, the famous Italian scientist, had gone blind around the time he
published his final book.
The Discourses and
Mathematical Relations Relating to Two New Sciences, published in 1638,
brought together many of Galileo’s most important findings on kinematics and
strength of materials, helping to shape the study of modern physics. Galileo
died only 4 years after its publication in 1642.
In particular, it outlined possibly
Galileo’s most impactful scientific discovery: that acceleration due to
gravity is a constant value, irrespective of an object’s mass. It also
contained some of Galileo’s other notable findings, such as those relating to
pendulums (he proved, for instance, that the period of a pendulum is the same
irrespective of the amplitude of the swing).
In thinking about places in
Margate that had some kind of connection to Galileo, I began to think more and
more about these physical phenomena that Galileo studied. I was thinking about
where you might see evidence of them in Margate, and that’s when my attention
turned to Dreamland amusement park.
Dreamland's historic Scenic Railway
Clearly, when it comes to rides
at amusement parks, the motion of bodies and the forces experienced are key
considerations in their design. Online, I even found teaching resources using the example of amusement parks to teach students specifically about
the physical principles that Galileo first outlined.
It occurred to me that a locative
walk through an amusement park like Dreamland could be an engaging platform for
people to learn the science by witnessing it in action. But how could I make
this an evocative, unique experience, and not just a science lesson?
When doing more research on Two
New Sciences, one of the details that captured my imagination was the
writing style. Galileo wrote his scientific manuscripts as dialogues between
three characters: Simplicio (reflecting Galileo’s early beliefs as a young man),
Sagredo (representing Galilieo’s middle years) and Salviati (representing
Galileo’s latest understandings).
This struck me as a surprisingly
creative method of communicating scientific knowledge, and I wondered if it could
be rekindled somehow for today’s audience.
I already had an idea about how
to playfully tie the words of the three characters to the locations in Dreamland.
In the making of Canterbury in 3 Words, I had recently been working with
the What3Words platform, a service that divides the world into three-metre squares and gives
each one a unique 3-word address (e.g. home.rinse.apply, on Dreamland’s Scenic
Railway).
I wanted to find a way for each
of Galileo's three characters to communicate a word of the 3-word address for each point on the walk, directing participants on their journey. I wasn’t sure exactly how this would work yet, but the
symmetry between the three characters and 3-word addresses seemed too good an
opportunity to miss.
In an attempt to flesh out this
early idea for my contribution to A Different LENS, I wrote this blurb:
bodies.in.motion
This idea seeks to explore The
Discourses and Mathematical Relations Relating to Two New Sciences by
Galileo Galilei. This was the final book Galileo wrote, covering much of his
work in physics, and had to be rushed at the end as he became blind before it
was finished.
In Two New Sciences, Galileo
introduces his subject matter as a dialogue between three characters,
Simplicio, Sagredo and Salviati. These figures represent Galileo at different
stages of his life, with Simplicio being the youngest and Salviati the oldest.
These discussions take place over a period of four ‘days’, with each day
covering a new topic, ranging from acceleration to the motion of projectiles.
bodies.in.motion aims to guide
participants on a walk that navigates the spaces of Dreamland amusement park,
where they will be able to observe and/or hear Galileo’s physical principles in
action. This will use the What3Words geolocation system and app, which divides
the world up into 3-metre squares and assigns each one a three-word address.
For each of the locations participants navigate to in Dreamland, one of the
words of its What3Words address will be spoken by each of Galileo’s three
characters. Once the location is reached, participants will read and/or listen
to a simplified dialogue that explains one of Galileo’s principles at an
appropriate part of the park (e.g. the Pendulum ride for thinking about
acceleration of falling bodies).
The main focus of the work will be on
drawing attention to the creative ways that scientific ideas can be
communicated more accessibly, drawing inspiration from Galileo’s use of
dialogues between characters. There is a comparison here to how What3Words
‘translates’ the geometric, mathematical properties of GPS coordinates into
words, which are easier to communicate and take on greater cultural
significance. In this way, the work aims to respond to the project brief and
aspirations around making the inaccessible accessible, overcoming challenges
and seeing our surroundings differently.
I held onto this concept for quite a
long time, as PhD commitments limited opportunities to develop the work further for a couple of months. I was also waiting to hear news about when
Dreamland would re-open after the first lockdown, as my design relied on people being able to walk between the rides inside Dreamland and see them in action.
I had to contend with the fact
that my idea simply wouldn’t work in the timescale needed for A Different LENS,
which was due to launch in September.
I needed a fresh approach; one that could operate beyond the confines of Dreamland amusement park.
Little did I realise exactly how far the project's reach would extend.
The next post in
this series explores how learning more about Galileo's life provided the
inspiration for the project’s story.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The video embedded above is a recorded version of the digital short I presented at the Digital Geographies Research Group's Virtual Annual Symposium on 1st July 2020. The DGRG is a research group of the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) and this was its 4th annual symposium, organised around the theme of 'Using the Digital: Methodologies, Teaching, and Everyday Practice'.
Digital shorts are brief summaries of an aspect of your research in 2-5 minutes. My presentation considered the opportunities and challenges for geographers in using digital game design as a research method for studying these media in practice. Here is the full abstract:
Digital games have begun to garner significant attention in geography over the past decade, as media with increasing cultural, economic and political influence globally, as well as distinct representational, affective, material and social attributes. Already provoking methodological innovations in the use of video ethnographies (Ash, 2010), covert and (auto)ethnographic play (Dornelles, 2019), alongside more conventional qualitative methods, where geographical scholarship on digital games has been lacking is in direct engagement with the processes of making these works.
This presentation will outline how I have used creative practices of digital game design and development as a geographical method for researching location-based games. Drawing on experiences from my autoethnographic PhD fieldwork, I will discuss how apprehending research questions creatively as a design brief can lead to more expansive understandings of the intricate relationships between digital technologies, embodied experiences and cultural meaning-making enacted through making and playing digital games. I will also touch on some of the challenges related to expertise, ethics and data collection presented by practice-based research on digital topics, which have been encountered and negotiated throughout my doctoral research.
I would like to thank Hannah Awcock and everyone else at the DGRG involved in organising this event, and my fellow presenters to contributing to such a diverse and rewarding programme.
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.
