Producing Platforms for Locative Play

• In Event: Games in the City, Games in the Home

Abstract

In July of 2016, the mobile gaming landscape shifted dramatically with the release of the highly anticipated and the intensely popular Pokémon GO. In 2018, Niantic are set to release another augmented reality game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Both games share one common feature, that location is represented as a node within a vast map of the world, building on data aggregated from Google Maps and algorithmically filtered crowd sourced locations from Niantic Lab’s other two location-based applications Ingress and Field Trip. Whether they are Pokéstops, Gyms, or Ingress Portals, locations become present in these games via the collective labour of mobile game players. Place and location intersect then not just in terms of presentation, but a larger sociocultural production of place. I argue that, through this process of exporting and abstraction of labour, Niantic have created a platform for producing location-based game, suitable to expand across a number of intellectual properties.

Through the construction of playable platforms, Niantic have created a monopolisation of representations of urban life and conditions. This paper draws from ethnographic observations of Ingress communities within Sydney and asks what is at stake when the labour of these communities is abstracted and ported to new location-based games. While it is unclear how Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will represent urban environments, it is clear that the embedded differential mobilities which preference play in the cities present in both Ingress and Pokémon Go will impact future location-based technologies and games.

Author

• Kyle Moore, Mr