The Space Between Debord and Pikachu


Davies Hugh Innocent Troy
2017 DiGRA '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference

In the heady discourse following the launch of Pokémon Go, many of the game’s influences, histories and precursors were forgotten or over-looked. Against the newness in which Pokémon Go is often framed, this article re-contextualises its history examining comparable practices and recalling the games evolution from earlier locative applications developed by Google to the experimental games of the modernist Avant Garde to which it has been compared. Central to this paper is discussion of the opportunities in the pervasive game development process for encoding and recoding the city by balancing in-game content with the nuances of the urban landscape in which it is played. While Pokémon Go has been revelatory in bringing awareness of pervasive gaming into the mainstream, this discussion of location-based games, public art projects, and playful approaches to urban exploration aims to fill gaps in the history of the field, and offer new possibilities for future game design and analysis.

 

Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists


Walz Steffen P. Ballagas Rafael "Tico"
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

REXplorer is a pervasive game service launching in June 2007. The game aims at persuading on site tourists to explore and enjoy the history of the UNESCO world heritage city core of Regensburg, Germany. In the game, historical and mythological spirits are stationed at touristic points of interest throughout the mostly Gothic and Romanesque city core of Regensburg. Players rent a special "paranormal activity detector" - a device composed of a mobile phone and a GPS receiver in a custom designed shell - at Regensburg's tourist information. Players interact with the location-based and site-specific spirits by performing a gesture, i.e. by waving the wandlike detector through the air in a specified fashion, thus "casting a spell". Situated gestures allow players to evoke and communicate with spirits to receive and resolve quests. With their detector, players can also take pictures, which appear on each player's individually generated souvenir, a weblog. The weblog also maps a player's route, describes spirits a player has encountered, and lists books and deepening URLs for each character and site. In this paper, we focus on the rhetorical approach behind REXplorer, and discuss exemplary formal and dramaturgical persuasive design tactics. These tactics, we believe, can not only help to make "serious" activities such as city exploration and history learning fun and sustainable, but also influence player behavior during pervasively computed and situated gameplay.