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

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The video embedded above is the recorded presentation I gave at the 20 Years of Seeing with GPS symposium, hosted online by the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London on 12th June 2020. This event marked the 20-year anniversary of GPS availability in the public realm, asking and reflecting upon how GPS has affected how we see the world.

My presentation discussed the potential of location-based games as platforms for storytelling about place, drawing on findings from testing my own game Canterbury in 3 Words, which I developed as part of my PhD fieldwork. You can read the words from this presentation below.

I’d like to thank Claire Reddleman and Mike Duggan for organising such a thought-provoking and inspiring event, and for persevering with hosting the symposium online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (and despite numerous technical challenges). I'd also like to thank my fellow presenters and those who attended the symposium for being part of such an illuminating, critical and creative discussion around GPS.

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GPS, and the locative media that operate using this technology, are often upheld as an example of how the specificity of place has been re-established in our globalised, ‘digital age’. With the internet’s capacity for information sharing, and mobile devices that let us access and attach information to locations in situ, it’s been suggested that locative media can intensify our relationships with the places we inhabit.

In talking about ways of seeing with GPS, I’m going to talk particularly about seeing playfully, in the form of designing and playing location-based games. I’m going to discuss the possibilities and challenges of these media for re-purposing instrumental applications of GPS towards providing platforms for diverse narratives of place. In the process, I’ll be suggesting that location-based games offer illuminating vantage points for understanding the affordances of locative technologies and platforms, as the practices of playful navigation that players adopt articulate the ways they both enable and inhibit means of attending to place.

I want to begin by highlighting that for as long as GPS has been open for public use, it’s been used for play. The first ever geocache was hidden on May 3^rd 2000, the day after selective availability was removed from GPS, which spawned the treasure-hunting game Geocaching that’s now played worldwide by millions of people. Since then, creative practitioners have drawn on the specific attributes of GPS to create ludic experiences centred on various forms of location-awareness. These include games that play with GPS’s accuracy as well as its inconsistencies, its relationships with forms of digital mapping, geo-tagging information shared via the internet, and the pervasiveness of its everyday usage in the Global North.

In doing this, location-based games and other playful applications of GPS have, to varying degrees, re-attuned awareness and reflection on locative technologies and the infrastructures that enable them, at a time when their pervasiveness has arguably made them less visible. At the same time, these media have been harnessed to shift modes of attention towards our surroundings in “sensory-inscribed” ways, as Jason Farman puts it. Examining location-based games can therefore be fruitful for apprehending the dual embodied and representational processes through which locations become meaningful to us, and the technologies with which these experiences unfold.

Traditionally, play has been understood as a sphere separate from everyday life; a magic circle entered voluntarily where special rules apply. Location-based games, however, are an example of pervasive play - one in which the magic circle is expanded to incorporate spaces and times of the everyday. The transformative potential of these games, it’s argued, is in how they draw on the ‘meaningful inefficiencies’ of play rules to cultivate new forms of awareness towards, and interaction with, the places we inhabit and their associated rhythms.

When it comes to the stories of place, we can observe how location-based games build on navigational practices fostered in earlier pervasive media such as audiowalks, which use movement through space as “narrativizing” practice. This close relationship between navigation and narrative can be explored further as locative media draw together different means of accessing and communicating information, which are articulated by the participating user.

My research sought to investigate the potential of location-based games to be both playful and participatory; telling and eliciting stories of places. But rather than approach this question by studying finished works, I wanted to learn about the affordances of these media in practice and in context, where I could access processes and relationships of production that are typically tacit and less visible. Game design in particular is highly iterative as a creative process, as you attempt to configure the contingent ways that people interact with the system you curate. I wanted to figure out what opportunities and challenges would arise in practically making a location-based game focused site-specific storytelling, to better understand how ludic practices of design and play might enable meaningful engagement with place.

I’m going to discuss this research here using the example of making Canterbury in 3 Words, a location-based game I made in my home city of Canterbury using the What3Words geolocation service.

But first, what is What3Words? What3Words is a free-to-use, commercial platform and geolocation system that divides the world into 3-metre squares and gives each one a unique 3-word address. These 3-word addresses never change, and are determined by an algorithm that converts GPS coordinates into the What3Words grid, attaching words from a library of those approved.

The company’s mission is to ‘make everyone, everything and everywhere easy to find’ – the idea being that it’s much easier to communicate location by saying three words than reeling off a list of coordinate digits. This idea came about when a delivery to the company’s founder ended up in completely the wrong location because a driver misheard GPS coordinates being relayed over the phone.

Since being founded in 2013, What3Words has partnered with a growing number of large corporations who make use of their system for purposes such as logistics and automotive navigation. In the UK, the service is often recommended to the public by local emergency services, as a way to quickly and accurately communicate your location in an emergency. Notably, the company has also partnered with postal services in Mongolia and Tonga, where What3Words has become the default addressing system in communities where street addresses never previously existed.

Unsurprisingly, though, this new method of mapping and locating presents a range of potential issues. What3Words is owned and managed as a business. The algorithm used to convert GPS coordinates to 3-word addresses is proprietary rather than open source, and even free users need to agree to a lengthy set of terms and conditions before using it. Individuals or organisations wanting to make high-volume use of their API will have to pay.

The words themselves too can be problematic. Obviously they’ll have pre-existing cultural associations – that’s part of why the system is said to aid communication. Users are aware of this when they spot amusing or opportune combinations of words, and there are whole forums online dedicated to finding these. But you can imagine how certain addresses could take on new significance when attached to culturally or politically sensitive sites.

Language settings are another factor. What3Words is currently available in 44 languages, however the same 3-metre square will have a completely different address in each different language, meaning that there’s no direct way to translate between them.

Lastly, geodetic movement can hinder the accuracy of an addressing system using a static grid. If an object shifts into a neighbouring square following events like earthquakes, it will have an address that bears no similarity to its previous one.

With these caveats in mind, as I was developing my design ideas, I was struck by how evocative the three-word addresses could be, even though their role on the platform itself is very instrumental. Addresses like ‘snows.alarm.builds’ almost seemed to suggest micro-narratives in themselves. Furthermore, as the second address on this slide shows, there were occasionally uncanny moments of synchronicity between the addresses and what could be found physically in the locations. It occurred to me that these combinations of words could potentially be interesting tools or prompts for storytelling.

I was also struck by the company’s aim for What3Words to make things ‘easy to find’. I started thinking about whether being able to find locations easier is actually productive for apprehending them as places. I wanted to explore the potential of geolocative platforms for engaging with place beyond the instrumental purpose finding specific locations.

The idea of a treasure hunt appealed to me as a type of game that both relies on locating, yet typically entails a slower, process of navigation that reconfigures forms of attention with your surroundings. In the process, players adopt a certain critical gaze through which they notice things about their environment that they weren’t previously aware of.

I was particularly inspired by the painted rocks game, which is played in local communities worldwide using Facebook. Players hide rocks they paint themselves in public places, and other players post photos with them to show when they’ve been found and rehidden. What struck me was how embedded it is in the everyday life of local communities, relying both on people coming across the rocks during their everyday activities and when doing their daily browsing on Facebook.

Drawing these ideas together, I devised Canterbury in 3 Words. The game involves sharing stories about places in Canterbury that use all three words of their addresses on What3Words, as well as a photograph clue. Other players can then attempt to find the locations using the information provided and the What3Words app.

The stories are posted on a private Facebook group, with players commenting on the posts when they find the correct 3-word address used in the story – without giving it away.

In November and December last year, I tested this game with 15 local people over a period of three weeks. After monitoring the Facebook group during this time and recording my observations, I then interviewed 7* of these players in the weeks after the test. The findings I’m going to talk about now are all based on this period of my research, though as I’ll explain later, the game has since evolved further.

*(I actually interviewed 8 of these participants; this was a mistake!)

Firstly, I want to talk about the opportunities the game enabled for creativity, discovery and improvisational relationships with Canterbury.

The two stories I’ve shared here were two of the earliest stories shared in the group, and I was surprised by the form they took. The author of the story on the left had decided to write his story as a poem, while the author on the right was inspired to write her story as an example of fantasy fiction.

When interviewing the author of the poem, he highlighted how the requirement of having to include the three words from the What3Words address in his story stimulated his creativity in a way that wouldn’t have happened if he was simply asked to ‘write a story about Canterbury’. The game rules afford him the opportunity to communicate a unique style of place narrative that might not have been shared otherwise.

Meanwhile, the author of the fantasy fiction told me she knew she wanted to write a story about these stone sculptures in the river, but it was the 3-word address that provided the lens through which her place narrative was told. The word ‘ritual’ in particular led her to re-imagine the story behind the sculptures in a way that was able to capture what she understood as the ‘magical’ qualities this place has.

For discovering stories shared in the group, the treasure-hunt format of the game, combined with the small-scale, 3-metre squares of the What3Words grid, made many players newly aware of places they didn’t know existed. I experienced this myself with these two images from stories shared in the Facebook group. I walk past these spots nearly every day in normal circumstances, but until the game test I’d never noticed these particular details. I was then inspired to find out the history behind them, discovering that the ‘Farewell’ plaque, for example, derives from one side of an old city gate demolished in 1833.

Equally, multiple interviewees remarked on how the attention to detail encouraged by this small-scale treasure-hunting gameplay changed how they encountered familiar locations. This participant recounted how, in the process of looking for a story location whose picture clue was a lamppost, he discovered how many different styles of decorative lampposts there are in Canterbury, which he’d never appreciated before. In her discussion of Geocaching, Maja Klausen argues that it through such processes of attunement – a particular ‘player gaze’ combined with the affordances of mediating technologies – that pervasive games can ‘re-enchant’ everyday urban spaces by revealing the affective potential that exists alongside the quotidian.

The performativity of this attunement process became most apparent to me in how individual players would negotiate the game’s affordances creatively by employing tactics. When sharing stories, in their photographs some players would frame their subjects in ways that made the location less obvious by removing contextual cues from the image. Also, if the landmark was covered by multiple squares on the What3Words grid, they’d tend to choose the address with words that were easiest to fit into the story.

When searching for story locations, players would scour the story texts to find words that seemed ‘out of place’ as clues for those that might be in their What3Words addresses. Furthermore, navigating to the story location for many participants involved triangulating between multiple sources of information outside of What3Words and Facebook, including Google searches, satellite view and Streetview on Google Maps, or the more analogue method of asking for help from others more familiar with the city.

All these practices demonstrate how the gameplay mechanics were able to cultivate creative practices of navigation, articulating the affordances of locative technologies and other digital platforms in situ to both engage with and tell stories of places in Canterbury.

Digging deeper into how players used the digital platforms employed for the game, however, the test revealed how What3Words and Facebook could be both enabling and limiting in different ways. Because the stories and records of finding them were all online, many players realised that the game could often be played without having to physically be in Canterbury. For some, this made the game much more accessible, particularly at a busy time not long before Christmas when many had other commitments and the weather wasn’t ideal. However, other participants felt that the game would have more ‘merit’ as a method of engaging with place if players were required to go to the places in person. Some even suggested adding features like GPS tagging to check this.

For the majority of players who did play the game while physically being in Canterbury, the granularity of the What3Words grid was found to be a limitation for both creating stories and finding story locations. As the 3-metre squares cover such a small area, any GPS inaccuracies on their mobile devices meant that the app could give them an address for a neighbouring square, rather than the one where their feature was situated. This happened with the story location shown here, where the landmark in question is actually in the square to the right. When finding story locations, players found that even when they visited the correct locations in person, there was often a slightly frustrating process of tapping on quite a few squares in the vicinity before they could identify the correct one.

The stories themselves and records of finding them were all shared via Facebook, which all the players bar one used before participating. Despite this, many of them expressed their general dislike for the platform in interview, with some citing privacy concerns, and others saying that they now only use Facebook for specific reasons, such as using groups like mine. Indeed, all of the interviewees said that they only accessed the game group directly or after seeing specific notifications for it, rather than seeing the posts when browsing their Timeline.

More functionally, participants felt there were limitations in how Facebook organised information. Posts on Facebook groups are ordered by recent engagement rather than most recently posted, which had the effect of sometimes ‘burying’ newer posts. Furthermore, in the use of Facebook Messenger to check each other’s solutions, messages from other participants would often be hidden in ‘Message Requests’ – essentially a ‘junk folder’ – if they weren’t ‘friends’ with them on the platform.

Overall, then, we can see that the affordances of the digital services employed in the gameplay had both enabling and disabling impacts on the spatiotemporal processes through which the players engaged with places in Canterbury. While some players negotiated these affordances in ways that provoked creative and re-enchanting methods of navigating the city, in other instances these platforms presented barriers to participation that could be frustrating. Particularly with Facebook, it made me question the ethics of using a platform people find troubling despite being widely used.

Before I conclude, I want to highlight one surprising observation from this fieldwork. For the test, I asked players to only write about locations within Canterbury’s city walls, as I felt the whole city was too wide an area for 15-person treasure hunt. I didn’t think much of this, but in interviews players frequently mentioned how grateful they were to know which areas ‘counted’, otherwise the locations could be ‘anywhere’ and would have discouraged them from searching in person. Some even suggested that confining the spaces and times further, perhaps in the form of game events, would have helped make the game a less ‘solitary’ experience, involving communicating in person rather than just through individualised digital devices. These comments indicate a continued importance of boundedness even for pervasive play, which raises some interesting questions about how these media are able to apprehend place expansively in terms of mobilities and trajectories. In the public version of the game, I’m exploring the question further in the creation of live, themed events that seek to develop more mobile and collective methods of interacting with the city using What3Words.

What I hope to have shown in this brief snapshot of my research with Canterbury in 3 Words is how engaging with location-based games can help to apprehend the affordances of locative technologies and platforms for engaging with place. Practices of playful design and play in location-based games entail navigational processes that enact how our relationships with place are formed through articulations of technologies, bodies and social norms. These practices can reorient locative media away from the instrumental purposes of identifying location efficiently, creating opportunities for storytelling and re-enchantment within everyday environments. Yet they come with caveats that raise important questions concerning barriers to access, ethics and the individualism of devices that have wider relevance for understanding what ‘location’ and ‘place’ mean to us in the so-called ‘digital age’.

These are questions that I’m probing further in the public version of Canterbury in 3 Words, which has now been live for over a month. This has involved iterating further on the design of the game, including incorporating live events as part of the gameplay, and further experimentation will be happening over the next few months. The Facebook group currently has 65 members, but it would be great to have more – so if you know anyone who is familiar with Canterbury, do let them know about the game.

Introducing Canterbury in 3 Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I’ve written on the game’s FAQs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niantic Wayfarer and Pokémon Go: Cultural Geographies of Wayspot Reviewing

During November last year, a significant new feature became available for players of Pokémon Go who had reached level 40, the maximum possible level in the game: the ability to submit nominations for new Pokéstop locations. Pokéstops are the in-game modules located at points of interest, which can be spun to receive items, quests and gifts to send to friends.

                    

Alongside this new capability, this same group of level-40 players has also been able to participate in the review system for these ‘wayspots’, called Niantic Wayfarer.

Here, submissions from other players are assessed according to a set of criteria outlined by Niantic, which new reviewers are tested on when they sign up. These criteria determine whether a location becomes a new wayspot, or is rejected. If approved, the wayspot will usually appear in all of Niantic’s games: Pokémon Go, Ingress and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Over the past three months, I’ve been getting to grips with the process of submitting Pokéstop nominations and reviewing them using Niantic Wayfarer. In this post, I’m going to discuss the guidance given to reviewers of wayspot submissions, and the implications that these criteria have for how Pokémon Go players engage with the places they play in.

What makes a good wayspot?

On Wayfarer, Niantic give the following guidance to reviewers for identifying good wayspot nominations.

One immediate observation to note from these criteria is the focus on discovery.

Niantic want wayspots that draw attention to locational features that players might otherwise be unaware of, particularly from the perspective of visitors to an area. They’re asking locals to draw on their fine-grained knowledge of place to add content to their games – and particularly content that will enhance the experience of discovery and novelty among their mobile player base.

By aiming for these types of niche locational features, Niantic are potentially tapping into a broader trend of ‘offbeat’ tourism. Facilitated by Instagram, travel blogging/vlogging, websites and guides like Atlas Obscura, as well as locative media that make finding these sites easier, this slice of the travel and tourism sector has become remarkably lucrative with the growth of the so-called ‘experience economy’.

Indeed, it’s worth highlighting how Niantic as a company have been developing increasingly close links with the tourism industry and cultural sectors across the globe. For a while now, we have seen in-game events to mark World Tourism Day on Pokémon Go, as well as regional Pokémon that (in theory, at least) can only be obtained by travelling to another part of the world or trading with someone else who has.

They are even working with cultural departments in municipal authorities across the world to host events for players of Niantic games. For example, the locations of this year’s Pokémon Go Safari Zone events in Taiwan, St. Louis, Liverpool and Philadelphia (the last three now postponed) were decided following a bidding process by the cities involved. The competition was seemingly justified by figures reflecting the impact of previous Niantic events for the local economies of previous host cities.

But what do these trends mean for how players of Pokémon Go encounter and make sense of their surroundings?

Alongside these guidelines for making ‘good’ wayspots, Niantic have also included a list of specific kinds of nominations that they value highly.

Here, we see more explicit recognition of education and discovery being ‘cornerstones’ of Niantic as a corporation.

But what is most notable about this segment of the guidance is how Niantic are actively aiming to produce landscapes of play in their own image – to shape player engagement with places in ways that accord with their company values. These include transport hubs like train and bus stations that ‘connect and unite people around the world’, public parks that encourage ‘walking, exercising and enjoying public spaces’, and libraries for their core values of education and discovery.

Of course, thinking critically, we should be asking what aspects of place are left out of the imaginaries that Niantic are curating through Wayfarer. This is where their criteria for ‘low-quality nominations’ become significant.

‘Low quality’ nominations

In this section of the guidance, Niantic is clearly setting out exactly what kinds of places should not be interacted with by players of their games. From a practical standpoint, these would appear to be for reasons of safety (both of players and non-players), accessibility and potential legal ramifications for the company.

Clearly, as a large games company with a vast player base, and one very much in the public eye, there is little scope in Wayfarer for anything transgressive when it comes to the usual caveats of location-based gaming: private property laws, emergency service operations, key infrastructure and restricted sites (though examples abound of people playing Pokémon Go itself in transgressive ways).

But what I have found particularly fascinating about these guidelines for ‘low quality’ nominations is the ineligibility of those that are ‘natural features’.

Aside from the contention surrounding the word ‘natural’, which could be debated endlessly (e.g. how the concept of ‘nature’ itself is produced by humans; the social, cultural and/or political implications of designating certain entities as ‘natural’ and others not; how humans and our constructions are themselves part of nature, etc.) there are quite a few conceivable cases where the logic behind distinction can become problematic.

Following Niantic’s criteria, a geological feature that has been present for tens of thousands of years would be rejected as a Wayfarer nomination. Yet a sign for the same feature that probably wouldn’t last 20 years without repair or replacement would be eligible.

This is despite advising reviewers to reject nominations that ‘do not appear to be permanent’ in the same section of the guidance.

Here, longevity as a factor for eligibility is seemingly trumped simply by the presence of man-made objects.

Furthermore, there are cases where, even going by conventional social and cultural norms, the boundaries between a man-made and natural feature can be hard to distinguish. These include sites like ruins, where plants will invade and grow without careful maintenance. How overgrown does a man-made object need to become before it is no longer seen as ‘man-made’? And how feasible is it for a reviewer to make this distinction from the photograph included in the submission?

One important geographical observation is that the impact of these criteria will be felt differently depending on the types of places where people play.

The difficulties faced by rural Pokémon Go players are already well-established, with fewer spawns (sites where Pokémon can appear), Pokéstops and Gyms than their urban counterparts, all of which are crucial for in-game events and general gameplay.

However, it is also in rural areas where these ‘natural features’ are more likely to be the culturally important sites that players will want to showcase by turning them into Pokéstops. Even where there are relevant man-made objects to nominate in rural areas, these are generally less likely to have signs and other associated ‘man-made points of interest’ when compared to similar sites in urban areas.

So while Wayfarer might appear to democratise the process of getting new Pokéstops and Gyms wherever you live, the criteria for assessing nominations still work in favour of player communities in more populated, built-up, well-signposted locations.

Grey areas and community standards

As we’ve already seen, the guidance given to Wayfarer users may not always be easy to apply in practice. Niantic itself recognises that its criteria could provoke differences in interpretation, and have created a page on ‘potentially confusing nominations’ in the Support section of Wayfarer.

This additional advice covers a number of cases that might be interpreted differently depending on which aspects of the guidelines reviewers prioritise, including graffiti/street art, cemeteries and memorials, playgrounds, post offices and trail markers. It also gives specific advice regarding the images used in nominations (they should be good quality, and shouldn’t include people).

  

When it comes to approving or rejecting these ambiguous submissions, the deciding factors seem to mirror many of the key considerations already noted: levels of public and pedestrian access, permanence, personal privacy, distinct cultural value and accordance with Niantic’s ‘cornerstones’ of discovery and education.

An example of one of the 'potentially confusing' nominations Niantic discusses on their support pages for Wayfarer

Yet in recent months Niantic have added two further clarification pages to the ‘Wayspot Acceptance Criteria’ Support page, one in October 2019 and one in January 2020. These seek to clarify even more ambiguous cases that Wayfarer reviewers have raised; the latter reacting particularly to the massive influx in new reviewers since the function was opened to Pokémon Go players in November.

As the number and range of submissions has increased, it has become clearer that many landmarks on the ground are still not easily categorised by Niantic’s criteria. As such, the responsibility for distinguishing between worthy and unworthy wayspots is increasingly passed onto the Wayfarer community.

This power is not insignificant. If reviewers unanimously decided to accept a nomination that would be deemed ineligible according to Niantic’s criteria, the only way the wayspot would be removed from their games is if somebody reported it to the company. Because players of Niantic games benefit from these wayspots, it is unlikely that they will report it themselves (unless they are particularly community-minded). So it may not be removed until the wayspot has caused such a level of disruption that non-players become aware of it.

In practice, it would be difficult to coordinate such a unified response, as reviewers have hardly any control over how wayspot submissions are allocated. But all it takes is for a few reviewers to make the same decision, and an otherwise ‘inappropriate’ submission can slip through the net.

Notorious examples include strip clubs being accepted as ‘unique local businesses’, while more worthy sites such as Michelin-star restaurants or local charitable organisations are rejected as being too ‘generic’.

While these are worst-case scenarios,  the more significant observation to make is that the looseness of Wayfarer’s reviewer guidelines has created space for community standards to develop. This is particularly impactful when it comes to landmarks that are culturally specific, which may not be adequately accounted for in Niantic’s criteria.

In the UK, this has happened with postboxes. There is now a de facto rule amongst Wayfarer reviewers that only postboxes bearing the Royal Cipher of King George VI or earlier will be accepted as wayspots, due to their historic value. Meanwhile, the vast majority of postboxes that bear the Queen Elizabeth II cipher are ineligible.

Adjacent postboxes bearing the Elizabeth II cipher (left) and George VI cipher (right)

In establishing these standards, Wayfarer communities are able to assert a degree of agency in determining sites that are culturally valuable and therefore worthy of inclusion in Niantic’s games.

Before we praise this as an exemplar of successful community cohesion in Niantic’s games, it’s worth pointing out the process through which Wayfarer reviewers are allocated submissions for new wayspots.

The submissions that reviewers receive can derive from any of the following categories: sites within a 150-mile radius of a reviewer’s last play location; from anywhere across their home country; from any of their home country’s territories; from bordering countries; or from the ‘home’ and ‘bonus’ locations that reviewers can set in their Wayfarer settings.

Due to the wide distribution of reviewers assessing any given submission, there are likely to be differences in the value judgements these reviewers make of sites that are submitted, particularly if the value of a given landmark is only likely to be recognised at a very local scale.

An example from my local Wayfarer community is the lampposts supplied to the city of Canterbury by the Biggleston company until 1963, which have very distinct features. Though the Biggleston lampposts that remain arguably have significant cultural value to citizens of Canterbury, to many reviewers from outside the city these lampposts will seem too generic to accept as points of interest.

So while there is scope in Wayfarer’s model for community standards of cultural value to develop – promoting discovery and learning about places that players of Niantic games visit – there will always be inconsistency in how both these and Niantic’s own criteria are applied to any individual submission.

Degrees of agency

Though Wayfarer is evidently not an uncomplicated system, it does serve some very clear purposes for Niantic.

As you would expect from a company whose profit is directly tied to user engagement, Niantic want to increase engagement with their games. One effective way of accomplishing this is to increase game content at a local level. Because Pokéstops and Gyms in Pokémon Go are so essential to the enjoyment of the game – giving you items that allow you to catch and heal your Pokémon, eggs you can hatch to get more Pokémon, and being the primary conduits for in-game events – the more that appear in a given area, the greater the ability of players to enjoy the game and play it as Niantic intends.

If Niantic were to evaluate all of the suggested wayspot locations themselves, there is simply no way they could cope without hiring a large and expensive workforce. By offloading this labour to a more-than-willing workforce – committed players who have already spent countless hours (and money) on Niantic games – not only do they avoid these significant costs, but they actively deepen the investment of players in Niantic’s values, objectives and the wellbeing of their games.

For these reasons, it is easy to see why Wayfarer exists and has made a notable impact on Niantic’s player communities.

Yet, like any form of distributed authority, its application is largely dependent on the individual people and communities of practice making the decisions, as well as the particular cases they deal with.

Niantic’s guidance for Wayfarer reviewers at once articulates a quite distinct set of values and responsibilities, yet leaves ample room for ambiguity and interpretation when dealing with the specificities of real-life submissions. This system can potentially account for local cultures and community values better than a single centralised reviewing operation run by Niantic Headquarters.

However, the process of allocating nominations, whereby reviewers can receive submissions from places and cultures with which they have very little familiarity, also works to hinder the development of coherent community standards.

This situation isn’t helped by the current lack of incentives for players of Niantic games to actually review Wayfarer submissions. As it stands, there are no in-game rewards for doing what is basically user-friendly admin, meaning that the only players helping to shift the backlog of wayspot submissions derive from the most commited segment of this already highly-committed group. Because the number of committed reviewers is low, the geographical range of submissions they receive is extensive. The potential for inconsistency in how these nominations are valued grows.

What the development of Wayfarer certainly has done is illuminate some of the geographical implications of Niantic’s particular brand of location-based gameplay. By revealing the underlying architecture of values, standards and systems that guide how content is added to their games, we can critically examine how the company is seeking to shape how we interact with our environments, and how this architecture is negotiated in practice by communities of players.

Making The Timekeeper's Return: Legacy

After the big day, I was invited to run one more meeting with the Cathedral Quarter team – to talk about how The Timekeeper’s Return went, and to celebrate the efforts of everyone involved in making the event a success.

When planning my presentation for this meeting, I decided to gather all the information I could find that would gauge how much work went into the event’s development, and the impact we made on both participants and the wider public. 

    

I worked out that I’d spent about 800 hours of my time on the project in total (the equivalent of 33.3 whole days!), while voluntary work from other individuals included 24 hours of graphic design work, 22 hours of acting and recruitment, and 6 hours of continuous work from the film crew who helped us capture the day (and many hours on top of this to edit the footage).

I had no way of measuring the substantial workloads taken on by individuals in the Cathedral Quarter team, which included help with the initial concept and ideas, marketing, admin, logistics, printing and organising meetings. But judging from the many hundreds of emails that passed between us all, I know it must have been significant – certainly when you’re running a business at the same time.

I also spent some time looking at the impact we made on social media.

In total, the main event page on Facebook reached 17,300 people with nearly 1,000 total views; while posts from the Cathedral Quarter Canterbury page on Facebook were received by 6,100 people (up 1000% from before the event), with 1,700 of these users engaging with the posted material (up 1800%). This led to an additional 40 people ‘liking’ the Cathedral Quarter Canterbury page, an increase of 900%.

On Twitter, the Cathedral Quarter account made 10,600 impressions since the event’s online launch, with 38 link clicks, 36 retweets and 66 likes in total.

Feedback

Let’s now have a look at some of the feedback from participants on the day.

Edd Withers, local entrepreneur and founder of Canterbury Residents Group:

The Timekeeper's Return was enlightening, exciting and intriguing. The storyline delivered a fascinating experience, and the people we met along the way enchanted with clues and messages from the story. The method of using hidden QR codes to keep us on the hunt to continue the game was easy to use and a great use of the technology we all have in our pocket, and the simplicity of the process was welcome. When we arrived to start the game, we were given clear instructions but still felt like we were starting on a mysterious journey. A wonderful way to spend an afternoon, exploring and learning - we felt like children again with a sense of wonder!

Lisa Carlson, CEO of Canterbury Connected Business Improvement District:

The Timekeeper’s Return was a magical and remarkably successful event, with more than 200 people of all ages enjoying following Mia Augustina’s adventures through time and space. Burgate was buzzing on the day, with locals walking alongside visitors from other parts of Kent (and even other counties) to discover what the Cathedral Quarter has to offer. What struck me most as I completed the treasure hunt was how Jack Lowe’s enthralling story weaved past and present together so expertly. Blending local history with real-life connection to businesses in the Cathedral Quarter today, participants had the opportunity not only to learn about the often-overlooked stories and landmarks that make this historic quarter so unique, but also to visit a diverse range of shops and eateries, engaging with people there who are passionate about what they do. It was heartening to see how much shopkeepers really seemed to enjoy the experience, playing their roles enthusiastically and doing their utmost to accommodate participants, even when they were busy. This is also a testament to the depth of planning that must have taken place to ensure all the different components of the event ran smoothly. Altogether, The Timekeeper’s Return will live long in the memory for the way it has helped to develop and promote a coherent, exciting Cathedral Quarter community. It’s a wonderful example of what can be achieved when the enthusiasm, work ethic and creativity of local artists and businesspeople come together. I can’t wait to see what Jack Lowe and the Cathedral Quarter do next.

Comments from feedback sheets and The Timekeeper’s Return event page:

I thoroughly enjoyed The Timekeeper's Return. Not only was it fun to spend the afternoon doing something different, but it also gave us an opportunity to get to know the history of Canterbury better, thanks to the vivid storyline. We also spoke to people we never would have had conversations with otherwise, like the shop assistants and other people who were doing the treasure hunt. Really impressed and I hope there'll be another treasure hunt soon!

Firstly, congratulations on creating such a fun treasure hunt! We spotted it advertised on Facebook and it looked great, so we thought we'd join in and do some exploring! Loved the simplicity of interacting with the QR codes, which are a good size to hunt for – learned a little about the area and Bell Harry Tower which we didn't know either! Impressed with how all the shop staff were keen to join in and make the event entertaining too!

Thank you so much for a great afternoon! We all had fun following the clues. The story was good and kept the kids interested. We went into a part of Canterbury we don’t normally venture to and enjoyed going in the shops we haven’t been in before.

That was so much fun! Learnt so much about the area and saw things I'd never noticed in the 30 years I've lived in Canterbury. Thanks so much for organising such a fantastic event!

And a big thank you to all the businesses that were involved for being so gracious with us treasure hunters even though they were so busy.

Very fun time, exploring and learning about the town. Loved the sense of discovery when you finally figured out a clue. Mia was the bomb – very immersive and convincing acting.

A well-researched, organised and interesting experience. A wonderful way to experience this part of Canterbury.

Brilliant event, well done to everyone involved. The organisers, the local businesses and the roaming helpers (who were very much needed!) This kind of event is what makes our local area great. Bravo.

Thank you for a lovely afternoon exploring shops and learning history from Canterbury that we had no idea about! It was so immersive and such a joy to take part in, from the hosts to the fantastic staff in the shops we visited we were thrilled!! Thank you again!

We had such a great time doing this!! Thank you so much for organising it. So many lovely shops we'd never been in before despite living in Canterbury. I'm planning a Christmas shopping day to revisit without the kids very soon!!

We had a great time following Mia's adventures and finding out more about Canterbury. Thanks for a great afternoon activity. Looking forward to another one?!

Absolutely brilliant idea. Our 3 year old loved it. Hope you do another next year :)

Thanks for creating this treasure hunt, it was great fun, and nice to see so many local businesses participating. Will the whole story be available anywhere to read through (when we're not excitedly rushing from clue to clue!)?

My partner and I thoroughly enjoyed the timekeepers return event. It was fun for all ages (we are both 21) to do and we learnt a lot more about the city we live in. I think more activities like this need to happen to encourage people to appreciate this city. Thank you!

Thank you. Had so much fun. Was reminded of history I learnt a long time ago, and learnt some new things too! Looking forward to the next trail.

Alongside this positive feedback, perhaps the most heartening interactions I’ve had since the event are with those asking me how I found sources for research into Canterbury’s history, how this fits into my own plans for the future, whether I’d be making other events or games of this type, and what it takes to make this kind of work.

On this last point, over the past year I have frequently given informal advice to individuals about the different possibilities of location-based and AR media for a wide range of projects. This has often revolved around particular apps and technologies that might be useful and the kinds of knowledge and/or skills typically required, as well as the possibilities and challenges for storytelling in these contexts.

Professionally, my experience of creating The Timekeeper’s Return has even led to consultancy work on location-based and narrative games.

Prize draw

As well as receiving rewards on the day, everybody who completed the treasure hunt was entered into a prize draw to win a bunch of excellent prizes donated by local organisations.

I had the pleasure of handing out the prizes to the happy winners in person two weeks after the event, at a small prize-giving held in the heart of the Cathedral Quarter.

We were especially delighted to see the winners of the grand prize – tickets for four people to attend the Christmas Pantomime at the Marlowe Theatre – enjoying their evening out.

The bigger picture

Since last autumn, Simon Yule from the Canterbury Cathedral Shop has written this short report of the event for the Cathedral Quarter website, and I gave a presentation that featured The Timekeeper’s Return at the Royal Geographical Society Postgraduate Forum Midterm Conference in April, which discussed the opportunities and challenges of making digital narrative works as a researcher.

Looking forward, many of you will be aware that this is just the start of my ambitions when it comes to designing location-based narrative games.

The research upon which my practice-based PhD is based involves creating, testing and producing more participatory media arts of this type, and I’ll be sharing further details about the work I’ve been doing for this project soon.

If you’re interested in getting involved in any upcoming game tests or public events I decide to run, stay tuned here and on my social media, or get in touch using the details on my About page.

As for the Cathedral Quarter, I’m pleased to say that the area is as welcoming and enchanting as ever, and the businesses have built on our previous success by hosting more well-received events.

Although small businesses are facing a very difficult economic climate across the country at the moment, particularly in retail, Canterbury has remained remarkably stable in comparison.

No doubt a big part of this relative success is down to the hard work and positivity of independent businesspeople like those in Cathedral Quarter, who make Canterbury city centre so unique.

I’d like to thank everyone at the Cathedral Quarter once again for commissioning me and for the continued faith they showed in me to deliver this project. I look forward to seeing you all and hopefully working with you once again in the future.

                                                                        

Credits

The Timekeeper’s Return

Designed, written and directed by Jack Lowe

Website design

AM Marketing

Graphic design

Sam Lowe

Recruitment

Canterbury Christchurch University Outreach

Testers

Oscar Dymond

Paul Dymond

Wendy Dymond

Tim Fairhall

Julian Steward

Marketing

Maria Cockburn

Jack Lowe

Printing

Canterbury City Council Print & Mail Centre

Omicron Reprographics

Participating businesses (in order of appearance)

Lakeland

Canterbury Cathedral Shop

Fitzgerald Jewellers

Canterbury Pottery

Canteen

Loake

Antoine et Lili

Biggs Opticians

Wrapped!

The Chinaman

Fired Earth

Chapter

Moat Tea Rooms

Veg Box Café

Stilwell Jewellers

Rewards kindly provided by

Canterbury Cathedral Shop

Prize draw prizes kindly provided by

The Marlowe Theatre

Chapter

Moat Tea Rooms

Canterbury Cathedral Shop

The Chinaman

Antoine et Lili

Canterbury Pottery

Special thanks

Maria Cockburn

Stefan Colley

Adam Ganz

Sandra Hadfield

Chris Needham

Mark Pegg

Acting

Dr. Mia Augustina

Oksana Savchenko

Rose

Rebecca Sampson

Max

Elizabeth Waterman-Scrase

Filming

Producer

Alex Preston

Camera operators

Zdravko Zhelev

Jules Davison

Sound

Laura Bailey

Assistant producer

Lexi Budd

Digital imaging technician

Morgan Davies

The Timekeeper’s Return was created by Jack Lowe on behalf of

Canterbury Cathedral Quarter

© 2018 Jack Lowe