ABSTRACT
Location-based games were among the first interventions into urban space that employed locative media for playful behavior aimed at challenging the conventions of public space. They use mobile phones, GPS (Global Positioning System), Bluetooth and WiFi technology and other location-aware technologies and devices to incorporate the physical location of players into the game. Early, pioneering iterations of these games such as The Beast (Microsoft 2001), BotFighters (It’s Alive! 2001-2005) and PacManhattan (Frank Lantz 2004) experimented with the ubiquity of mobile and locative media to create games that blended digital gameplay with the physical environment, geography, and everyday locales of urban space. While location-based gaming projects continue to be developed by artists and small communities of players, today they increasingly appear as commercial apps for the iPhone or Android platforms. This shift has transformed location-based games from a niche genre, little known outside artistic circles, and brought them into the mainstream mobile gaming market. The advanced GPS technology and superior graphics of smartphones, combined with digital distribution services like Apple’s App Store, provide location-based games with a vastly greater audience of potential players. But this transformation also illustrates how location-based games-once the purview of artists, amateurs, and small commercial outlets-have been adapted into the relatively new value chain of the global app economy. It thus raises broader concerns over the extent to which location-based games have been co-opted by commercial interests and the growing conflation of play and leisure with labor, at the expense of their capacity to challenge the norms and conventions of public life in the city. In this chapter I examine the theory around location-based games in the context of the emerging “app economy” and the growing commercialization of locative media taking place with the success of the iPhone and Android platforms. I argue that the proliferation of these devices signals a shift in locationbased gaming, from its avant-garde origins in the locative art movement of the 2000s to today’s growing consumer-driven appropriation of locative media technology. I begin by tracing the origins of location-based gaming within the locative art movement, which situates early location-based gaming projects within a
historical trajectory of avant-garde practices aimed at repurposing the public spaces of the city for play. With the shift toward apps, however, I investigate how location-based games are becoming increasingly commercialized as they seek to compete within the highly competitive, concentrated, and profit-driven mobile games industry. I examine one particular location-based game development studio, Red Robot Labs, and their game Life is Magic, released for iOS and Android in early 2013. I argue that the entrance of location-based games into the app economy represents a shift away from their roots in the locative art movement, one which illustrates the growing capture of digital play by the increasingly competitive mobile gaming market.
