Simulation & Gaming

Volume 40 Number 5
October 2009 602-625
© 2009 Sage Publications

Playful Urban Spaces 10.1177/1046878109333723

http://sg.sagepub.com
hosted at
A Historical Approach to Mobile Games http://online.sagepub.com

Adriana de Souza e Silva

North Carolina State University, USA
Larissa Hjorth
RMIT University, Australia

This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and
hybrid-reality mobile games. It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used
as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies to show how the concept of play
has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the trans-
formation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the “phoneur”; sec-
ond, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and last, the wall subculture
called parkour. The authors present a classification of the major types of mobile games to
date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play apparent within these former
tropes of urbanity. With this approach, they hope to address two weaknesses in the current
scholarship—namely, differentiating among a range of types of games mediated by mobile
technologies and assessing the important effects of playful activities.

Keywords:  cell phones; dérive; flâneur; gaming; historical approach; hybrid-reality

games (HRGs); location; location-based mobile games (LBMGs);
locative media; mobile games; mobile gaming; mobility; parkour; phoneur;
play; playful activities; playful spaces; urban games (UGs); urban
spaces; urbanity

T his article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-

based, and hybrid-reality mobile games (UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs, respec-
tively). It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful
spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies in order to show how the concept
of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity:
first, the formation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the
“phoneur”; second, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and
finally, the wall subculture called parkour. We suggest that the popularity of these
games is not solely dependent on the developments of mobile technologies but also

Authors’ Note: We would like to thank Victoria Gallagher (North Carolina State University) and Ingrid
Richardson (Murdoch University, Australia) for acting as reviewers of this article. Their comments and
suggestions helped us improve it significantly.

602
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   603

has roots in these earlier forms of play activities that had already transformed public
spaces into playful spaces. By analyzing these activities, we show that urban spaces
have always had the potential to be playful, even before the ability of navigating
them via mobile technologies. We therefore analyze how these three historical tropes
of urbanity construct a notion of play that comes into fruition through the develop-
ment of current UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs. We claim that mobile games are built on
this earlier desire to transform physical “serious” spaces into playful spaces. Like the
flâneur, the practice of the dérive and the parkour, UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs, rather
than taking place on the cell phone screen, use city spaces as the game board.
We also present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date,
addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play present in these former
tropes of urbanity. With this approach, we hope to address a gap in scholarship,
which often fails to differentiate among games played with mobile technologies,
ignoring their effects on the way we experience cities, mobility, and public spaces.

Urban Spaces as Playful Spaces

As mobile phones became popular, so too did “mobile gaming.” Generally, when the
term mobile gaming is used, it refers to games played on the cell phone screen (Rodriguez,
2006). However, location awareness and global positioning system (GPS) devices
embedded in mobiles turn them into interfaces to navigate physical spaces. By adding a
digital information layer to places, mobile technologies might add value to physical
spaces (Johnson, 2003). For example, some location-based services might attach “digital
information” to specific places, such as the history of a building or directions to the closest
mall, so that if a user with a location-aware cell phone enters the range in which the
information was “attached,” he or she can access it with their device.
In the case of games, mobile phones may overlay a fictitious narrative as well as
virtual game elements onto urban spaces. For example, Mogi was a HRG released in
Japan in 2003, in which players needed to collect virtual objects spread throughout the
city of Tokyo. With a mobile phone equipped with location awareness, a player would
catch an object whenever he or she was within 400 meters from it. Objects such as
fruits or animals were seen on the radar on the cell phone screen depending on the
player’s position in the city. Players could also interact with each other depending on
their physical location. Through the game, players transformed the urban space of
Tokyo into a playful and ludic space, rediscovering the city as they walked around in
search of virtual objects and other players (Licoppe & Inada, 2006).
It is misleading, however, to say that Mogi simply transformed the city of Tokyo
into a playful space. As it will be argued in the following section, urban spaces might
be regarded as inherently playful. We use Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) concept of social
spaces to support our idea of playful spaces. We also highlight some aspects of the
604   Simulation & Gaming

traditional definitions of play in order to bring out a few concepts as analytic tools
that are helpful in our examination of games in urban spaces. Using mobile devices
to navigate these spaces, thus, transforming them into game boards, only highlights
how much urban spaces have already been used as playful spaces.

From a Definition of Play and Playful Spaces

Our idea of playful space is derived from Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) concept
of social spaces. According to Lefebvre, spaces are not given but rather constructed.
We are used to think of physical/natural space and mental space as preexisting
structures, disconnected from social practices. Within Lefebvre’s logic, however,
our spaces reflect economic and power relations present in each historical time
frame and, therefore, express social practices. As such, social spaces are social
products. For Lefebvre, social spaces are composed of the triad social practices
(perceived spaces), representations of space (conceived space), and representational
spaces (lived spaces). Perceived spaces highlight the relationships between “daily
reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the
places set aside for work ‘private’ life and leisure)” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p. 38).
Conceived spaces express a certain understanding of the place that its designers’
(such as architects and urban planners) had in mind when constructing it. We then
interpret such signals when inhabiting these spaces—a sort of official coding of the
space. Finally, lived spaces are described spaces, passively experienced by poets,
artists, and writers. Obviously, all three instances of social space (perceived,
conceived, and lived) are intrinsically connected to each other and cannot be
understood separately.
If we understand space as a product of social practices and as something
constructed by movements of people and by the very “use” of this space, then,
following Lefebvre, we might conceive spaces not only as social but also as playful,
since play is an intrinsic social movement emergent by the relationships between
people (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). In this sense, we suggest that playful
spaces are a subcategory of social spaces in the realm of social practices (perceived
spaces), in that they highlight the relationship between daily routine and urban
reality. Playful spaces are mostly urban spaces and are produced by the mobility and
interactions of people who inhabit these spaces.
The idea of playful spaces also challenges how play has been traditionally
understood, as an activity separate from our “serious” ordinary life (Salen & Zimmerman,
2003; Caillois, 1958/2001; Huizinga, 1938/1955). We want to focus on how the
concept of play is reframed when the play activity takes place in urban spaces and
merges with it—when the boundaries of the “magic circle” are permeable or
nonexistent. In a playful space, play ludic or “spontaneous and undirected playfulness”
(McKean, 2006).
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   605

Play has been conceptualized in many different but overlapping ways. One of the
earliest and most popular definitions of play comes from Johan Huizinga (1938/1955),
in which he states that play is older than culture (since animals also play), but it is also
central to human society. Huizinga defines play as “a free activity standing quite con-
sciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing
the player intensely and utterly” (p. 13). Furthermore, play “proceeds within its own
proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner”
(p. 13). In this definition, Huizinga points out four components of play:

1. the creation of the so-called “magic circle,” that is, the existence of boundaries
between play and ordinary life
2. a sense of total immersion in the play space
3. the freedom of the activity
4. the existence of some type of rules

Although Huizinga has evidently emphasized the central role of play in human
culture and that the most “serious pursuits exhibit playful aspects” (Rodriguez,
2006), most game scholars to date emphasize the activity of play as separate from
daily life (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 80; Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971). In an
attempt to summarize and standardize all definitions of play, Salen and Zimmerman
(2003) propose three categories of play: game play, ludic activities, and being play-
ful. Going from the more specific to the more general, we have the following:

• Game play includes play inside a game.

• Ludic activities include play in less formal structures than that of a game, like play-
ing with a ball.
• Being playful represents the broadest category.

In their example,

being playful while walking down the street means playing with the more rigid social,
anatomical, and urban structures that determine proper walking behavior. (Salen &
Zimmerman, 2003, p. 304)

It is this last concept of play as “being playful” that helps with our analysis of
experiencing urban spaces as playful. However, all of the above-mentioned authors
were concerned with the definition of play as it relates to games. Furthermore, they
specifically framed play within the “magic circle,” that is, as an activity separate
from the ordinary aspects of life, with specific boundaries of time and place. In
contrast to these authors, we focus on a definition of play as casual play. More spe-
cifically, we connect the concept of play to the idea of ludic. In understanding urban
spaces as playful spaces, we are adding to Huizinga’s original definition in that,
606   Simulation & Gaming

1. the boundaries between play and ordinary life are blurred or challenged
2. the feeling of immersion in the play space becomes an immersion in the physical
space of daily activities and even a way of rediscovering familiar urban spaces
3. “freedom” is related to spontaneity—movement through space without a prior
blueprint or plan (Rodriguez, 2006)
4. rules exist not as an ultimate goal but as clues for navigating spaces, as is the case
with the situationist dérive shown in the next section

UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs are by definition games, since they are, following Salen
and Zimmerman (2003), systems “in which players engage in an artificial conflict,
defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (p. 80). But what happens to
urban spaces when they become the play space? How can the concept of play be
understood when the playful activity ebbs in and out of the magic circle? What are
the implications for “play” when the game/playful activity also includes passersby
as nongame participants?
In order to understand the degree to which these emerging and yet remediated
(Bolter & Grusin, 1999) forms of playful urban mobilities reframe urban spaces as
playful spaces, it is important to contextualize this phenomenon through the rise of
their early predecessors. The 19th century flâneur and 20th century phoneur, the
Situationist International (SI) practice of the dérive, and the 21st century parkour
exemplify playful uses of urban spaces both prior to and beyond the use of mobile
technologies. By analyzing these forms of urban playfulness, we will see that this is
the concept of play that should be considered when studying mobile games, rather
than the pure definition of play within games.

From Flâneur to Phoneur:

Recontextualizing Play in Urban Spaces
One method for conceptualizing the role of play in contemporary urbanity, as mirrored
by all-pervasive mobile technologies, is vis-à-vis the rise and transformation of the icon
of late 19th and early 20th century modernity, the flâneur. With the implementation of
Baron Haussman’s vision of Paris as new boulevards graced by department stores and
furnished by railways, the 1870s ushered in a new type of stroller. As both the product
and icon of this new urbanity, the flâneur vividly epitomized sociologist Georg Simmel’s
(1950) damning critique of bourgeois “conspicuous leisure”. The flâneur was both a
symbol of bourgeoisie and the new emerging 20th century capitalism. Commonly
translated as the male stroller, the flâneur wandered and consumed the city with detracted
gaze. He provided another type of lens through which to read and participate in the city,
exploring new angles and avenues in the shifting vignette of early postindustrial urbanity.
In this new picture of modernity of which the flâneur played both the role of the distanced
critic and immersed spectator, vision was central.
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   607

The flâneur symbolized the new multiple dimensions of mobility within modernity—
physical, geographic, cultural, and economic mobility. By his mobility, the flâneur
reterritorializes the city through a series of playful (ludic/spontaneous) actions,
rescripting the city and its increasing commodification into a game of modernity in
which he both participates and observes. As an index for the then-nascent rise of the
urban, the flâneur was popularized by Walter Benjamin (1927/1999) in his infamous
The Arcades Project as well as, to a lesser degree, by his analysis of the painter
Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term.
Within the domain of play, we can characterize the flâneur—and its transformation
into the phoneur—as the ludic character by excellence. Unlike the flâneur that was
ordered by the visual, the phoneur is structured by the information city’s ambience,
whereby modes such as haptic and aural override the dominance of visual. This
reprioritizing of the senses in terms of urban spaces in the 20th and 21st centuries is
made apparent through UGs and their disruptions of normalization within everyday
life. UGs, as will be shown in the next section, remind us of the importance of play
to understand the way in which space is politicized and normalized; indeed, by
conceptualizing contemporary notions of play and mobility within the context of the
flâneur, we can begin to understand the performance of urbanity. Within this context,
the term ludic distances itself from the traditional definitions of play we have seen
in the last section—which are mostly related to games or structured play—and
closely relates to the idea of casual play as well as the act of wandering through
urban spaces, activity that is personified by the flâneur. Through his wandering, the
flâneur merges the “serious” space of the city (designed to promote circulation of
people; include: Hannan, Sheller, & Urry, 2006) with the ludic activity of casual
walk, therefore, eliminating the boundaries of a distinct and separate play space.
One hundred years on from the time of the flâneur, the spirit of modernity has
dramatically transformed while still haunted by the specters of the spectacle. Although
the contradictions of everyday are still palpable, the cityscape and its mediations have
changed. The city, as with notions of work and leisure, has dramatically altered
course, epitomized by the mobile phone’s “hyper” and “micro” coordination (Ling,
2004) of social, temporal, and spatial configurations. Mobile technologies have
further embodied the contradictions inherent within everyday urbanity, becoming
the conduit for the phenomenon of “full-time intimate communities” (Nakajima,
Himeno, &Yoshii, 1999).
The new global cities, according to Saskia Sassen (1991), are now templates of
human/dataflow interfaces. For Robert Luke (2006), these cartographies of “information
networks” (Castells, 1989, p. 169) are further amplified by the role of the mobile phone
to engage the user as conduit for commercial information “flows.” If the flâneur
epitomized modernism and the rise of 19th century urban, then for Luke (2006), the
phoneur is the extension of this tradition as the icon of postmodernity. While the world
of the flâneur was orchestrated by scopophilia (the obsessive pleasure of looking), the
608   Simulation & Gaming

phoneur’s reality is mapped by “the commercial grids and communication vectors (the
sociotechnical constructs of communication)” (Luke, 2006, p. 189).
As Luke continues, “an identity is mobilized as the phoneur wanders, observed while
(s)talking the city streets” (p. 189), all the while being “stalked by corporate hunters”
who “place the social relations of phonerie amidst flows of commodity and desire”
(p. 191). Here, Luke paints a dystopian picture of the phoneur as consumer, unable to
break free of a capitalist interpellation. The physical and geographic mobility of the
phoneur is a misnomer—underscoring this mobility is the inability to escape surveillance
and tracking. Although Luke proffers a sobering model of postmodernity in the icon of
the phoneur as a vehicle for m-commerce and surveillance, it is within the realm of
mobile gaming that these commercial data trails are subverted and displaced, redefining
the phoneur away from the digital-citizen-as-consumer conflation Luke is suggesting
and toward the magic circle of a game. Through mobile gaming, the phoneur shifts from
his lineage as a 21st century version of the flâneur’s vision and distanced participation
in the spectacle, and instead, he partakes in the gestures of locality.
The flâneur, as a type of hero of modernity and modernism, was very much an
instrument for 20th century’s emphasis on visual cultures, whereas the phoneur’s sensory
experience is arguably more prompted by the aural and the haptic. This can be witnessed
with the rise in various forms of mobile gaming—from consoles such as Nintendo Wii
that are mobile and haptic within the domestic sphere to UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs that
are mobile and haptic in the public sphere—in which the significance of embodiment
becomes central to the game play. Indeed, this is one of the main compelling reasons
why mobile games provide such a variety of disruptive mechanisms for the phoneur to
discover new demographies and cartographies of familiar locations. The data geo-
imaginary of the city painted by Luke, through the disruptive techniques of mobile
games, circumnavigates surveillance and tracking by partaking in the suspension of
belief/disbelief of the game play. While the phoneur in Luke’s vision is a conduit for the
normalized and increasingly surveying nature of urban spaces as 21st century
informational cities, within the realm of mobile gaming, the phoneur is able to decenter
the power relations through the merging of playful actions and urban spaces. For both
phoneur participants and also intimate strangers that inevitably get caught up in the
gameplay of UGs, the magic circle of the game automatically fades and is blurred with
the order of various “flows”—geographic, electronic, sociopolitical—of the context.
Thus, paradoxically, the phoneur is the transmitter of normalizations of the informational
city while also being the very agent to disrupt these media and ideological flows.
Mobile games take the phoneur away from what Luke defines as “panoptic
mechanisms” of mobile media, further reinforcing high capitalism and the digital-
citizen-as-consumer rubric. They, thus, move the phoneur away from his part in
“commercial grids and communication vectors” that Luke sees as “the reality for the
phoneur.” Mobile games intervene in the maps—geographic, emotional, social, and
technological—that trace the patterns of everyday life. If “at heart, the mobile
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   609

concept is about being in control—as a separate and distinct individual” (Myerson,

2001, p. 20), then UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs decenter this “control” and place the
phoneur in the pushing and pulling of play. The phoneur is released from its digital-
citizen-as-consumer rubric, and the city, once “territorialized within the rubric of
capital and commodity flows” (Luke, 2006, p. 203), is transformed into a space of
casual play. Through these games, the phoneur is no longer the conduit for these
forms of capital and informational flows but is also able to disrupt the very rules and
normalizations through play. It is not only in the idea of the flâneur/phoneur that the
city could be experienced in a ludic way. In the middle of the 20th century, the
situationists gave the flâneur a distinctive and radical twist.

The Dérive as a Drift Through Space

The SI group led by Guy Débord developed a “technique” to wander through city
spaces called the dérive. According to Débord,

in a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for
movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let them-
selves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
(Knabb, 1981, p. 50)

In this sense, the dérive is a way of experiencing cities distinct from the usual
motives that indicate how one generally moves through urban spaces. Sheller and
Urry (2006) suggest that historically, literature on transportation, that is, travel, was
separate from the activities they led to, which means that people would be on the
move, go from place to place, with the goal of getting somewhere. However, the
space traversed was often ignored. Within this logic, urban spaces were mostly used
as circulation spaces, where one keeps constantly moving around, with the goal to
arrive at specific locations, but often, the space in between lacked meaning.
The dérive is an attempt to restore meaning to the spaces of circulation of the city.
By using city spaces without any further purpose, the practice of the dérive “forces”
participants to look at the familiar urban spaces with a different set of eyes. For
example, the first dérive done in Amsterdam, used walkie-talkies to connect
participants who were spread out through geographically disconnected areas of the
city. Their idea was to link up parts of the city that were separated spatially. This
concept is closely related to the activity of HRGs and LBMGs. Using cell phones,
instead of walkie-talkies, players also “drift” through the city as a way of interacting
with the game narrative and other players and, by doing that, also experience the city
in unusual and new ways. In UGs, HRGs, or LBMGs, players wander through the
cities without necessarily having the goal of going from place to place, or at the very
least, their goal-oriented traversal is altered by game-play. It is in this mode of casual
610   Simulation & Gaming

moving through the city that these types of mobile games reenact the dérives’
playful/ludic behavior.
Most important, however, is to realize the extent to which these activities of
the dérive and UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs reveal the city space’s playful character.
According to Débord, the dérive is a “technique of rapid passage through varied
ambiences,” involving “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeo­
graphical effects” (Knabb, 1981, pp. 50-54). The dérive, therefore, designates certain
areas as suited for ludic activities. It is in its connection to play that we find the
strongest similarities between the practice of the dérive and mobile games.
Drawing from Roger Caillois’ (1958/2001) definition of play, Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman (2003) describe play as “free movement within a more rigid structure”
(p. 304). Similarly, Débord views the dérive as “a combination of chance and planning,
as an ‘organized spontaneity’” (Bassett, 2004, p. 401). However, unlike the surrealist
experiments, and Baudelaire’s flâneur, in which chance played a strong role, the dérive
was less about randomly walking through the city for its own sake and more about
experiencing its contours, zones, and vortex. So the architecture of the city itself played
an important role in the dérive. For example, in the algorithmic dérive, “different groups
followed a simple algorithm (second right, second right, first left, repeated) to construct
a path through the city, sometimes resulting in zigzag paths, sometimes spirals and
loops” (Bassett, 2004, p. 403). Within this context, one might think that the dérive
resembles the definition of play within games, in which play involves some set of rules
and restrictions. As emphasized by Débord, however, it is the “organized spontaneity”
of the dérive that connects it to the original concept of ludic. Although there are some
rules, the player drifts throughout the city and never knows where the algorithmic
behavior is going to take him or her, so the act of moving through space acquires
relevance over the rules themselves. Similarly, in a UG, LBMG, or HRG there are rules
and goals that drive the players’ movement through the city, but players might also walk
randomly as they experience the urban space according to the game narrative. Moreover,
the interaction with transportation flows and the architecture of the city—which
construct a game space that was not created for the purpose of the game—expands and
complicates the original idea of the magic circle.
Like UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs, a dérive provides a rich source of ideas for
exploring and possibly understanding cities. These activities encourage players/
participants to rediscover cities with which they are familiar or go to unexplored and
unknown areas of the city. According to Keith Bassett (2004), “the dérive is thus a kind
of elaborate game, but one that leads to a radical re-reading of the city” (p. 401).
From the definitions above, we can perceive that the dérive, besides considering
the city space as a playful/ludic space, also emphasizes collective play. “One could
dérive alone, but Débord thought small groups were preferable” (Bassett, 2004,
p. 401). UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs are also collective experiences. Although some
UGs and LBMGs might be played individually, the meaning of the gaming
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   611

experience comes from the interrelationships between players (de Souza e Silva &
Sutko, 2008).
The practice of the dérive, as a collective playful experiment that takes place in
urban spaces, inherently mixes playful and everyday life “serious” spaces. Libero
Andreotti (2002) points out that the dérive “radicalized Huizinga’s theory of play
into a revolutionary ethics that effectively abolished any distinction between play and
seriousness, or between art and everyday life” (p. 215). Likewise, UGs, HRGs, and
LBMGs, in transforming urban spaces generally used for “serious” activities into
playful spaces, also blur the borders between play and seriousness. More recently,
the practice of the parkour appeared as another way of using city spaces in playful
ways and transforming the flows of movement and mobility through the city.

Parkour: The 21st Century Flanêur

Parkour is “an urban practice of rapid on-foot movement that follows the maxim
‘keep moving forward’, with spectacular running and jumping” (Thomson, 2008,
p. 251). As such, the definition of parkour is closely related to Débord’s concept of
the dérive as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (Thomson,
2008, p. 253). One of the most famous parkour scenes is the opening sequence of
the 007 movie Casino Royale, where a character runs away from James Bond using
the city architecture as an ally.
The parkour practice experiences the city as a series of obstacles to be overcome.
Traceurs, as its practitioners are called, challenge usual ways of navigating through
urban spaces, tracing routes through which no ordinary person would dare to go. For
example, a traceur jumps across buildings, climbs on walls, and sees every single
piece of architecture as objects to help construct or facilitate their trajectory.
Although UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs do not necessarily require players to challenge
the city architecture, they include the preexisting architecture of the city into the
game play and challenge the concept of the magic circle. These games encourage
players to discover unknown areas of the city.
Thus, by experiencing the city as an unknown space, players also reterritorialize
the cityscape with new meanings and experiences (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Furthermore, the traceur completely uses urban spaces as playful spaces when he or
she moves around the architecture of the city with the only goal of traversing the
spaces, rather than getting somewhere. Her pleasure stands in challenging the space,
creating new ways of moving through it. Within this context, the traceur might be
viewed as the 21st century flâneur, but instead of following the city boulevards, she
challenges the cityscape.
Like the flâneur/phoneur continuum, the practice of the dérive and the parkour,
UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs use city spaces as playful spaces. Although all these types
of games have the characteristics of taking advantage of the player’s mobility
612   Simulation & Gaming

through physical space by using a mobile device as the game interface, they
also have some distinguishing features among themselves. The following section
highlights these differences, in order to provide a general overview of the key types
of UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs to date and how they bring into fruition these early
modes of using the city space in playful ways.

A Classification of Mobile Games

Urban Games
By using the urban setting as the canvas for the playful activity, UGs arrest, subvert,
and transform modes of mobility and immobility within the everyday; in other words,
urban gaming allows players to rediscover the particular weave of social fabric that
constitutes play. With the rise of so many divergent forms of mobile gaming, the term
itself has come under much debate. For this purpose, we define UGs as games that use
the city space as the game board. UGs are often multiplayer games played out in the
streets of the city. Examples include B.U.G. (United States), Proboscis’ URBAN
TAPESTRIES (United Kingdom), and INP URBAN VIBE (South Korea).
As Frank Lantz (2006) notes, “Big Games” are “large-scale, real-world
games that occupy urban streets and other public spaces and combine the richness,
complexity, and procedural depth of digital media with physical activity and face-to-
face social interaction” (Lantz, 2006). Lantz emphasizes the importance of these
projects in testing the notion of reality as mediation.
Big games highlight the ways in which games can reflect and challenge social
norms, reminiscent of political movements such as SI in the 1960s and the more
recent phenomenon of the parkour. Indeed, the ability of “Big Games” to interrupt
the normalcies of the everyday by allowing participants to transcend their role of
citizens-as-consumers is detailed through Luke’s conceptualization of the phoneur.
Games like BIG URBAN GAME (B.U.G.), SHOOT ME IF YOU CAN, CONQWEST,
and NODERUNNER exemplify this tendency.

BIG URBAN GAME (B.U.G.) (St. Paul and Minneapolis, 2003). BIG URBAN
GAME (B.U.G.) consisted of a 5-day event occurring across the streets of Minneapolis
and St. Paul in 2003 (Lantz, 2006); 200 square miles becomes the canvas for a
spectacle that transforms the everyday into a site of unfamiliarity and the sublime.
Three teams raced conspicuous 25-foot-tall red, yellow, and blue inflatable game
pieces through the cities orchestrated by public decisions registered on the B.U.G.
Web site. The aim of B.U.G. is for teams to visit all the sites in the quickest time. It
is up to the players to decide how they will move from site to site and, therefore,
achieve the game’s goal. As a game that deploys different notions of embodiment,
scale, and context, B.U.G. brings together the flâneur’s wandering of the city with
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   613

the dérive intervention into everyday life. Rather than the flâneur wandering, observ-
ing the spectacle of modernity, in B.U.G, players become part of the spectacle. The
spectacle of the big inflatable game piece is impossible to avoid, disrupting normal
movements wherever it goes. People stop and stare. Streets full of movement become
still. Players become the game’s parts, engulfed by the magnitude of the nodes. Play
takes on then a new relationship to the players as teams grapple with the reterritorial-
ized cityscape. Spectacle marries gesture in B.U.G.; the canvas of the urban becomes
a colorful site for the extraordinary. This game rehearses Débord’s dérive in which
the spectacle of the everyday is disrupted by another spectacle that dislocates nor-
malcy and everyday order.

SHOOT ME IF YOU CAN (Seoul, 2005). Orchestrated through the South Korean
new media center, Nabi, URBAN VIBE presented a variety of games that drew from
earlier board games such as chess. One particular project, a chasing game involving
camera phones and MMSing called SHOOT ME IF YOU CAN, consisted of two teams
pitted against each other, in which the aim was to “shoot” all the opposing team mem-
bers without being shot yourself. Rather than guns, it was the lens of the camera phone
that shot by taking pictures, which were then sent back to the master. SHOOT ME IF
YOU CAN consisted of members running around a busy shopping district of Seoul,
Myeong-Dong. The result is a game in which immediacy and delay are part of the
experience, with unexpected moments like “waiting for immediacy” becoming the
poetics of delay. That is, the role of frustration surrounding technological lag and
desires of instantaneity has often been discussed in terms of the game play of UGs
(Hjorth, 2008).

CONQWEST (United States, 2004). In CONQWEST, a game conducted in several

U.S. cities in 2004, the classic treasure hunt becomes a series of nodes in the form of
semacodes (Lantz, 2006; Svahn, 2005). Semacodes look similar to barcodes and work
in unison with the camera phone; that is, when the player takes a picture of the sema-
code with their phone, it directly connects to a specific Web site online. The urban
space is filled with a series of semacodes, and teams navigate their way around the city
in order to find these semacodes and “take possession” of areas of the city. Each sema-
code has a dollar value and the first team to accrue 5,000.00 dollars worth of treasure
wins the game. Five teams race through the city in the hope that they will win the first
prize—winners get the equivalent amount of value in scholarship funds as their win-
ning amount ($4,000 codes equates to $4,000 in scholarship funds for their school).
Each team is conspicuously identified by the fact that they carry giant inflatable mas-
cots. One must ask—is this just a newer form of fund-raising? Indeed, one could see
such games as rehearsing Luke’s notion of the phoneur as a “digital-citizen-as-
consumer”; however, such an approach neglects the fact that the game is about team
work and collaboration—two notions very much eroded by the rhetoric of the infor-
mational city as a spectacle of digital-citizens-as-consumers.
614   Simulation & Gaming

NODERUNNER (New York, 2003). Another example of a UG that deploys the

paradoxes of online mobile technologies within the mapping of the cityscape is
NODERUNNER, by Yury Gitman and Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena. It was devised
for an exhibition called “We Love NY: Mapping Manhattan with Artists and
Activists,” organized by new media art organization Eyebeam (Galloway, 2005). The
aim of the UG was to transform notions of what constitutes public art—rather than
the permanent sculptures people would associate with public art, NODERUNNER
presented the ephemeral and contingent.
In NODERUNNER, the cityscape of Manhattan is reterritorialized into hot and
cold spots—determined by access to the Internet. The aim of the game, in which two
teams are pitted against each other, is to access and document (via camera phones)
as many of the wireless Internet nodes as possible while attempting to get from
Bryant Park in midtown to Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. Teams are given a
WiFi-enabled laptop, a digital camera, taxi fare, and 2 hours. Points are obtained by
taking camera phone pictures of themselves in the exact spot at which they connected
to the wireless Internet; they are also awarded points for using scanning software to
find the nodes on their journey. NODERUNNER highlights the various cartographies
of Manhattan—geographic and technological.

As these four games show us, UGs have the ability to transform normalizations of
urban spaces into sites for collaborative and politicized play. They show how we can
intervene in the regulation of everyday practices and show that UGs function very
much like an extension of dérive practices—disrupting, dislocating, and disordering
the urban space. This allows phoneurs to become politicized, no longer sublimated
by digital-citizen-as-consumer interpellations. UGs demonstrate that within the rise
of urban modernity, the flâneur still plays a pivotal role in informing and transforming
the geoimaginary space of the urban. In sum, UGs transform the everyday cityscape
into a playing field by deploying various forms of new and old tactics and media.
They bring new insight into the burgeoning urban and human geography studies,
teaching us much about the layers of information and data constituting a city today.

Location-Based Mobile Games

LBMGs are games played with cell phones equipped with location awareness
(via triangulation of waves or GPS) and Internet connection. Like UGs, LBMGs use
the city space as the game environment. However, they additionally allow the linking
of information to places, and players to each other via location awareness. Although
LBMGs might have an online component, the game takes place primarily in the
physical space and on the cell phone screen, as players can see each other and/or
virtual game elements on their mobile screen. BOTFIGTHERS, GEOCACHING,
CITITAG, and ALIEN REVOLT exemplify this trend.
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   615

BOTFIGHTERS (Stockholm, 2001-2005). Building on the former experience of the

dérive, BOTFIGHTERS players communicated via text messages (instead of walkie-
talkies) and would drift through the city in search of other players. Also, like the dérive,
the game players experienced the city through the eyes of a tourist and found new unfa-
miliar places in the cityscape. BOTFIGHTERS was the world’s first multiuser LBMG.
Created by Swedish company It’s Alive in 2001, the game’s goal was to virtually shoot
other players in the vicinity using short message service (SMS). In order to play, one
had to create an avatar (a robot) on the game’s Web site, which could be armed with
guns and shields. The avatar was then “downloaded” to the player’s cell phone.
Once on the streets, players received text messages, such as “bot x nearby,”
whenever another player was in the vicinity. A player could also search for another
bot, sending a text message to the game server like “search for bot y.” Shooting in
the game was also done via text messages. The accuracy of the shot depended on the
physical distance between players as well as on the type of gun in the player’s
possession. For example, a fairly accurate shot could be done within 200 meters.
However, if the player were a sniper, the shot could hit almost a mile away (de Souza
e Silva, 2008a; Sotamaa, 2002).
A second version of BOTFIGHTERS released in 2005 deployed Java-enabled
phones. In this version, players could see each other on their screen radar, which
displayed their physical positions in relation to each other. Even though one could
decide to turn the cell phone off or to temporarily be unavailable for searching and
shooting, the game was always running in the background. That is what made
BOTFIGHTERS a pervasive game. BOTFIGHTERS was popular between 2001 and
2005 in countries such as Sweden, Finland, and Russia.

GEOCACHING (2001). GEOCACHING is also one of the first available LBMGs.

However, different from BOTFIGHTERS, the game is not necessarily multiplayer.
It is also not played with a cell phone; it uses GPS devices as the game interface. The
goal of the game is to find hidden caches in bizarre and inaccessible places. In order
to play, the first step is to go to the game Web site and find where caches are located.
Caches can be found in more than 180 countries. The Web site has each cache’s
coordinates, which the player must download to the GPS device in order to find the
hidden object’s location.
Each cache is classified according to a type and two numbers that range from 1
to 5; the first number indicates how difficult it is to find the cache, and the second
one shows how tough the terrain is surrounding the cache. Number 1 means easy;
number 5 means hard. The traditional cache consists of a container and at least a
logbook inside it. After finding the cache, the player must sign the logbook and
report that she found the cache to the player who hid it. The note is then posted to
the Web site. If, besides the logbook, there is also any object inside the box, the
discoverer is allowed to take it, as long as she leaves another object in the box. The
616   Simulation & Gaming

rule is, “If you take something, leave something in return.” Anybody who can search
for a cache can also post one. As the game developed, users’ involvement increased,
with them creating and contributing new types of caches.
Mobile technologies have a strong relationship to physical spaces, and in the case
of GEOCACHING, this is enacted via the use of GPS devices to map territories and
find “treasures,” transforming the physical environment into an unexplored territory.
The transformation of the game/physical space into this unmapped territory is
exactly where the playful element of GEOCACHING relates to the earlier activities
of the dérive and the parkour. Although Geocachers, unlike the flâneur, have a
specific goal in their movement through space (finding a cache), they need to explore
the game space (like in the dérive) to play the game. It is this exploration that
embeds a playful meaning to the game space, since the player moves around, going
to places to where he or she generally would not go.

CITITAG (Bristol, U.K., 2004). The deployment of various forms of mobility and
immobility to create play is also the outcome of the LBMG CITITAG. Organized by
the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) in Bristol, U.K., in 2004,
CITITAG has been described as a wireless location-based multiplayer game,
designed to enhance spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences (Vogiazou,
Raijmakers, Geelhoed, Reid, & Eisenstadt, 2006). Luke’s phoneur is released from
its citizen-as-consumer rubric and into the spontaneity of a reworked “playground
tag” through a coordination between online and offline activity. Like all these
LBMGs, the cityscape becomes the playground in which both players and passersby
become embroiled in new experiences. In CITITAG, the schoolyard “tag” is
extended by players equipped with a GPS-WiFi-enabled iPAQ Pocket PC searching
out opposing team members to tag. While reading the Pocket PC, players need to
negotiate the difference between enemies on screen and offline. If a player gets
tagged, they need a friend to set them free. Sometimes innocent bystanders get
tagged because they look like they are in the offline position corresponding with the
online coordinates; the notion of intimate strangers is thereby further tested.

ALIEN REVOLT (Rio de Janeiro, 2005-2007). Following much of BOTFIGHTERS’

tradition, ALIEN REVOLT was the first LBMG commercially launched in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in May 2005. The game was the result of a combined effort among
the company M1ND Corporation, who gathered the development team together: the
Brazilian operator Oi, who provided the cell phone service; the engineers of the
German company Siemens in Brazil, who developed the algorithms for the first
mobile location-aware platform in the country; and Nokia, who opened the applica-
tion programming interface for its Series 60 mobile phones for the game develop-
ment (de Souza e Silva, 2008b).
After learning about BOTFIGHTERS, ALIEN REVOLT’s developers decided to
go beyond the idea of the first-person shooter and create a complete role-playing
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   617

game. Moreover, instead of starting with the basic SMS technology, M1ND Cor­
poration developed the first version of the game for the Nokia S60 java mobile
phones, which allow players to create their characters on the cell phones, instead of
having to go to the game Web site. Everything is done using the mobile platform.
ALIEN REVOLT tells the story of a group of alien creatures who try to take over
the Earth. Players can decide to join the human forces or the alien army and choose
between three classes of characters—Magus, Hacker, or Warrior—each of which has
different attributes and abilities. The closer the opponent, the larger the character that
appears on the screen. Like in BOTFIGHTERS, shots are more accurate at a close
range. Players can then invite each other for a duel by positioning the aim on the
target and pressing “5” to attack. If targeted, a player has the option to use a blackout
mode in order to become invisible in the enemy’s radar, which gives her three
seconds to shoot back while hidden.
Finally, if there is no other real player around, it is possible to fight against
nonplayable characters, which are virtual creatures displayed on the radar by the
server. Nonplayable characters have a real position in physical space, and every time
a player logs in, she is able to see four of them. These virtual creatures, besides being
a good source of weapons and armors once killed, also fill in empty players’ areas
in the game. ALIEN REVOLT uses the city as a playful space by creating a fictive
narrative and superimposing it on the architecture of the city.
ALIEN REVOLT’s players say that they generally play the game on the way to
school or to work, so much of the game play actually happens inside buses (de Souza
e Silva, 2008b). As we mentioned earlier, buses as part of the urban public
transportation system is embedded in a city dynamics of circulation spaces, moving
people around from point to point (include: Hannan, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). A game
like ALIEN REVOLT, however, creates opportunities for people to use this
in-between space in meaningful ways—for example, to play a game. Just like the
practices of the dérive and the parkour, playing a LBMG causes people to
reterritorialize circulation spaces (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They do so by using
these spaces in a playful way. In the case of ALIEN REVOLT, it is not that the player
drifts without a goal, but rather, the game itself may access the player in unexpected
ways, such as when another player pops onto the cell phone radar. The playfulness
then becomes spontaneous and undirected as well.

LBMGs are similar to UGs in that they use the city space as the game board.
However, the use of a GPS cell phone as the game interface transforms it into a
location-based game. By using a location-aware interface, LBMGs not only attach
information to physical spaces but also allow players to see each other’s position in real
space. Like UGs, LBMGs reflect the practices of the dérive and the parkour by
creating what we called ludic play—that is, frequently players navigate the city in
unusual and unexpected ways as a consequence of the game narrative/players. This
movement through the city might be goal driven—that is, when a player goes out
618   Simulation & Gaming

specifically to play the game—but it is generally spontaneous—by moving through the

city in their usual routes to school or work, players are accessed by the game—a fact
that turns their experience of the city into an unexpected playful adventure. Furthermore,
like the dérive, LBMGs are social experiences, and the coordination with other players
becomes critical for the creating of the play activity. HRGs, in turn, create a hybrid
game space, which is shared simultaneously in physical and digital spaces.

Hybrid Reality Games

Much of the innovative research on mobile gaming has been conducted around
hybrid reality gaming (Davis, 2005; de Souza e Silva, 2004, 2006; Licoppe & Guillot,
2006; Licoppe & Inada, 2006) that aims to challenge the role of copresence in every-
day life—forging questions around boundaries between digital and physical spaces.
HRGs are played with cell phones equipped with Internet connection and location
awareness. Like UGs, they transform the city into the game canvas, and like in
LBMGs, players interact with each other depending on their relative position in
physical space. Additionally, HRGs have an online component, represented as a 3D
virtual world, so they take place simultaneously in physical and digital spaces. It is
the shared game experience among multiple users that creates the hybrid reality.
HRGs have three main characteristics (de Souza e Silva, 2008a):

1. They are mobile, that is, the use of mobile technologies as interfaces require play-
ers to be actually moving through physical spaces in order to play the game.
2. They are multiuser, that is, the doubled play space requires more than one player.
3. They define a new gaming spatial logic, since the game takes place simultaneously
in physical and digital spaces.

HRGs like CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?, UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU,
PACMANHATTAN, and MOGI need players in both spaces in order to be played.

CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? (London, Tokyo, Barcelona, etc., 2001-2004). In CAN
YOU SEE ME NOW?, the street players’ mission is to chase online players. Street play-
ers run on the streets equipped with a GPS device, a walkie-talkie, and a handheld com-
puter, which shows a 2D map of the city and the position of online players. Online
players are at remote computer terminals and can “walk” through a 3D representation of
the same city in which they can see their own avatar as well as the position/avatar of the
street players. Both types of players, although occupying differentiated spaces (physical
city space and digital 3D modeled city), can meet in the same hybrid space created by
the game, which includes both physical and digital spaces simultaneously (Flintham
et al., 2003). CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? was the first HRG, created in 2001 by the
British group Blast Theory and The University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab.
In mixing both digital and physical spaces, HRGs create a different experience of
play. We have been attesting so far that urban spaces have been playful spaces even
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   619

before the advent of the mobile phone. After the popularity of video and computer
games, digital spaces have become one of the most popular play spaces. HRGs
merge urban and digital spaces to create an interconnected playful space. The
traditional concept of play as defined by the magic circle, which had been already
challenged with the expansion of game spaces to urban spaces, as in the case of UGs
and LBMGs, is further called into question with HRGs, where a virtual 3D world is
overlapped and interconnected with the existing urban space. Generally, this 3D
world represents the physical urban space, creating a doubled sense of place, in
which the playful space becomes permeable and is without definite boundaries.

UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU (London, 2003). In HRGs, actions in digital
space have direct implications on the physical city and vice versa. For example, in
UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU, another collaboration between Blast Theory
and the Mixed Reality Lab, online players might collaborate with street players in
order to help them find Uncle Roy’s office, which is a real location in the city
(Benford et al., 2004). Online players inhabit a 3D map of the city where they can
see the positions of street players. On the other hand, street players walk around the
city and are able to see the online players’ avatars on a map on their personal digital
assistants that represents the city. By inhabiting a digital environment, online players
have access to postcards of the city containing specific information that might help
street players. Online players, however, cannot walk in the city and physically find
Uncle Roy’s office. Therefore, to accomplish the game’s mission, both players must
work together by sharing information that is place specific.
Another interesting fact about HRGs (and also about UGs and LBMGs) is the
implications of passers-by. For example, while playing UNCLE ROY, frequently,
players need to ask for information to people on the streets, who are technically not
part of the game but somehow become plugged into this new game space. This is
another example of how HRGs further challenge the traditional definition of play as
separate activity with clear boundaries between playful and ordinary life. A regular
person can be walking their usual path from home to work and suddenly find himself
or herself participating in a HRG if asked for information by a player.
Additionally, although UNCLE ROY has a time limit—and, therefore, one might
win or loose the game in case he or she doesn’t find Uncle Roy’s office—the play
experience is much looser than in a regular game. It is actually constructed from the
relationships built with other players (online and on the streets) during the course of
the game and through the navigation/exploration of the city space in order to find an
unknown fictitious place (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). In this sense, the playful
experience in UNCLE ROY—and other HRGs—is much closer to the play we find
with the dérive, the parkour, and the flanêur rather than in traditional game play.

I LIKE FRANK (Adelaide, 2004). Another collaboration between Blast Theory and
the Mixed Reality Lab, I LIKE FRANK, was played in 2004 in the city of Adelaide,
620   Simulation & Gaming

Australia, and in a digital environment that mimicked the same city. In order to play,
participants had to register with Blast Theory for a 60-minute experience as street
players. The game included street players as well as online players. Street players used
a mobile phone as the interface to play the game and to navigate the physical cityscape
of Adelaide through a 2D onscreen map. Online players could play from anywhere in
the world using a home computer, Internet connection, and Web interface to navigate
a digital 3D model of Adelaide. Online players could see the position of street players
in the 3D world and communicate with them via text messages. The goal of the game
for both types of players was to find Frank (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008).
Although Frank was a fictional character, his office had a specific location in the
city, which was revealed to online players in the 3D world in the form of postcards.
The street player did not have access to the online information but was able to move
through the city. The street player thus needed to trust an online player and ask for
information in order to find Frank’s location. Having access to different types of
information and different play skills, both online players and street players need to
collaborate to complete the game and, through the game dynamics, gain a different
perspective on the urban space of Adelaide.

PACMANHATTAN (New York, 2004). Another HRG to deploy color with spec-
tacle and gesture is PACMANHATTAN. Indeed, taking the retropower of Pac Man
outside his normal virtual world and placing him in a real-world context was bound
to create fun and interest (Lantz, 2006). As the title suggests, PACMANHATTAN
consisted of Pac Man game play within the actual streets of Manhattan—a person
dressed as Pac Man (wearing yellow) tried to avoid being “eaten” by other people
dressed in various primary colors and simultaneously eat the virtual dots on the
streets. In a remote location, players in a control room in constant contact with street
players via cell phones update the street player’s physical position on a digital map
of the city. The only way for the street players to know which dots have already been
eaten is by talking to his or her controller. The necessary interaction between street
and online players makes PACMANHATTAN a HRG.
Here, we see the meeting of the flâneur with the tactics of the parkour or, in other
words, the phoneur partaking in the dérive. As in the Amsterdam dérive, participants
coordinated via walkie-talkies what would then become spontaneous playful
movement through the city. As in the dérive, players have no predefined route, but
their course is determined by the position of other players and by real-time instructions
received from players who can see their position on a virtual map of Manhattan on a
remote computer screen. The play activity thus emerges from the unexpected
interactions among players—local and remote—and among players and play space.

MOGI (Tokyo, 2003-2007). MOGI was the first commercial HRG. It was released
in Japan and developed by NewtGames from 2003 to 2006. The game was played
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   621

with cell phones equipped with GPS or cellular positioning. It used the player’s
relative position in physical space to construct a game space that overlaid the city of
Tokyo. MOGI’s goal was to collect virtual creatures and objects spread out in the
city with the cell phone in order to form a collection.
Virtual objects and creatures had specific locations and habits and could be
collected whenever a player was 400 meters from them. Additionally, in order to
complete their collections, players were encouraged to exchange objects with each
other. On their cell phone screen radar, players saw a map of the region where they
were, including not only virtual creatures and objects but also other players signed
in to the game. Players could then exchange messages with each other. Finally, online
players logged into the game had a bird’s-eye view of the game location, with the
relative position of all players (Licoppe & Guillot, 2006; Licoppe & Inada, 2006).
As of August 2004, MOGI had about 1,000 active users1 in Japan, who paid 210
Japanese yen (1.8 dollars) a month. In 1 year, MOGI had over 40,000 logins, 70,000
objects picked up, and 70,000 messages sent. Although users generally logged in all
day long and on all days of the week, the hunt time generally occurred during the day,
from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., while the mail and trade peak occurred after 8 p.m. MOGI is
a HRG because, besides using the city as the game board and employing cell phones
equipped with location awareness as the game interface, the game action occurs
simultaneously in physical and digital spaces representing the city of Tokyo. For
example, when online players guide street players to find objects and creatures in the
city space, they can see a view of the city that is hidden for street players. By sharing
information and collaborating with each other, they construct this hybrid space.

Especially after 2003, UGs, HRGs, and LBMGs became more popular. Rather than
providing an exhaustive list of all the current games on offer, the above list has attempted
to identify some of the most innovative experiences in this gaming genre, relating them
to previous urban experiences of the flâneur/phoneur, derive, and parkour. A more
descriptive correlation among these games can be found in the appendix.

Conclusions

The significance of games to teach us about place, cultural practice, and play
is clearly demonstrated by contemporary mobile games. Rather than video and
computer games that have, up until recently, neglected the importance of physical
geographic spaces, UGs, LBMGs, and HRGs remind us of the pivotal role games play
in understanding phenomena around embodiment/disembodiment and mobility/
immobility. As mobility becomes not only a key indicator of material practices but also
symbolic of postindustrial urbanity, mobile games can provide much insight.
Furthermore, by using urban spaces as the game board, these games also challenge
traditional definitions of play and force us to look at city spaces as playful spaces. One
622   Simulation & Gaming

way to conceptualize this phenomenon is through three historical tropes for urbanity:
the shift from the flâneur to the phoneur, the tactic of the dérive, and the wall subculture
called parkour. While the rise of mobile technologies has enabled mobile gaming to
expand, we have argued that the rise of mobile gaming has not been solely dependent
upon that development; rather, mobile gaming, like mobility and play, has a long history
in earlier play activities that already transformed public spaces into playful spaces.

Appendix
Location-Based Mobile
Urban Games Games Hybrid Reality Games

2001 THE GO GAME (United BOTFIGHTERS CAN YOU SEE ME

States) (Stockholm, Helsinki, NOW? (Sheffield,
Moscow, Dublin), Rotterdam, Tokyo,
Geocaching Barcelona, etc.)
2002
2003 BIG URBAN GAME UNCLE ROY ALL
(St. Paul, Minneapolis), AROUND YOU
NODERUNNER (London), MOGI
(New York) (Tokyo)
2004 CONQWEST (Minneapolis, CITITAG (Bristol), I LIKE FRANK (Adelaide)
Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake SAVANNAH (Bristol)
City, Phoenix)
2005 SHOOT ME IF YOU ALIEN REVOLT FREQUENCY 1550
CAN (Seoul) (Rio de Janeiro) (Amsterdam)
2006 SCOOT (Australia)
2007
RIDER SPOKE (London)
Note:This table is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather, it lists some of the most popular UGs,
LBMGs, and HRGs to date.

Note
1. The active MOGI user logs in at least once a month.

References
ALIEN REVOLT. (2005-2007). Brazil: M1nd Corporation.
Andreotti, L. (2002) Architecture and play. In T. McDonough (Ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist
International (pp. 214-237). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Avedon, E. M., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The study of games. New York: John Wiley.
Bassett, K. (2004). Walking as an aesthetic practice and a critical tool: Some psychogeographic experi-
ments. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28, 397-410.
Benford, S., Flintham, M., Drozd, A., Anastasi, R., Dowland, D., Tandavanitj, N., et al. (2004). UNCLE
ROY ALL AROUND YOU: Implicating the city in a location-based performance. Proceedings of the
Advanced Computer Entertainment Conference. Singapore: ACE.
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   623

Benjamin, W. (1999). The arcades project (R. Tiedmann (Ed.) and H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin (Trans.)).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1927)
BIG URBAN GAME (B.U.G.). (2003). St. Paul, MN: College of Design, University of Minnesota.
Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
BOTFIGHTERS. (2001-2005). Sweden: Daydream.
Caillois, R. (2001). Man, play and games. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (Original work published
1958)
CAN YOU SEE ME NOW? (2001-2004). Nottingham University, UK: Blast Theory and The Mixed
Reality Lab.
Castells, M. (1989). The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the
urban regional process. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
CITITAG. (2004). Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK: Centre for New Media.
CONQWEST. (2004). [Designed by Frank Lantz.] AMP.
Davis, A. (2005). Mobilising phone art. Retrieved May 19, 2008, from http://www.realtimearts.net/
article/issue66/7782
de Souza e Silva, A. (2004). Art by telephone: From static to mobile interfaces. Leonardo Electronic
Almanac, 12(10). Retrieved January 4, 2006, from http://leoalmanac.org/journal/Vol_12/lea_v12_
n10.txtz
de Souza e Silva, A. (2006). Interfaces of hybrid spaces. In A. P. Kavoori & N. Arceneaux (Eds.), The cell
phone reader: Essays in social transformation (pp. 19-44). New York: Peter Lang.
de Souza e Silva, A. (2008a). Hybrid reality and location-based gaming: Redefining mobility and game
spaces in urban environments [Online first: March 18, 2008, doi:10.1177/1046878108314643].
Simulation & Gaming.
de Souza e Silva, A. (2008b). ALIEN REVOLT (2005-2007): A case study of the first location-based
mobile game in Brazil. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 27, 18-28.
de Souza e Silva, A., & Sutko, D. M. (2008). Playing life and living play: How hybrid reality games
reframe space, play, and the ordinary. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25, 447-465.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Flintham, M., Anastasi, R., Benford, S., Hemmings, T., Crabtree, A., Greenhalgh, C., et. al. (2003). Where
on-line meets on-the-streets: Experiences with mobile mixed reality games. CHI, 5(1), 569-576.
Galloway, A. (2005, January 26). Playful mobilities. Critical mobilities. Keynote address at Floating
Points 2: Networked Art in Public Space Symposium, Emerson College, Boston.
GEOCACHING. (2001). Seattle, WA: Groundspeak.
Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Mobilities, immobilities and moorings [Editorial]. Mobilities,
1, 1-22.
Hjorth, L. (2008). Waiting for immediacy: The convergent inertia between mobility and immobility. In K. Nyíri
(Ed.), Towards a philosophy of telecommunications (pp. 189-196). Vienna, Austria: Passagen Verlag.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston: Beacon. (Original work
published 1938) I LIKE FRANK. (2004). Nottingham University, UK: Blast Theory and The Mixed
Reality Lab.
Johnson, S. (2003). Wireless communications and the future of cities. Retrieved February 23, 2009, from
http://urban.nyu.edu/events/wireless/index.htm
Knabb, K. (Ed.). (1981). Situationist International anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.
Lantz, F. (2006). Big games and the porous border between the real and the mediated. Receiver Magazine,
16. Retrieved May 19, 2008, from http://www.vodafone.com/flash/receiver/16/articles/index07.html
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Malden, MA: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974)
Licoppe, C., & Guillot, R. (2006). ICTs and the engineering of encounters: A case study of the develop-
ment of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminal. In J. Urry & M. Sheller (Eds.), Mobile
technologies of the city (pp. 152-176). London: Taylor & Francis.
624   Simulation & Gaming

Licoppe, C., & Inada, Y. (2006). Emergent uses of a location aware multiplayer game: The interactional
consequences of mediated encounters. Mobilities, 1, 39-61.
Ling, R. (2004). The mobile connection. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Luke, R. (2006). The phoneur: Mobile commerce and the digital pedagogies of the wireless web. In P. Trifonas
(Ed.), Communities of difference: Culture, language, technology (pp. 185-204). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
McKean, E. (Ed.). (2006). Oxford American dictionary. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
MOGI. (2003-2007). Japan/France: NewtGames.
Myerson, G. (2001). Heidegger, Habermas and the mobile phone. Reading, UK: Icon Books.
Nakajima, I., Himeno, K., & Yoshii, H. (1999). Ido-denwa Riyo no Fukyu to sono Shakaiteki-imi [Diffusion
of Cellular Phones and PHS and its Social Meanings]. Joho Tsushin Gakkai-shi, 16(3), 79-92.
NODERUNNER. (2003). New York: Uncommon Projects.
PACMANHATTAN. (2004). [Developed by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program.]
Rodriguez, H. (2006). The playful and the serious: An approximation to Huizinga’s Homo Ludens. Game
Studies, 6(1). Retrieved June 2, 2008, from http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/rodriges
Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Sassen, S. (1991). The global city. New York: Princeton University Press.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207-226.
SHOOT ME IF YOU CAN. (2005). Seoul, South Korea: Art Centre, Nabi, Urban Vibe.
Simmel, G. (1950). The metropolis and mental life. In D. Weinstein & K. Wolff (Trans.), The sociology
of Georg Simmel (pp. 409-424). New York: Free Press.
Sotamaa, O. (2002). All the world’s a Botfighters stage: Notes on location-based multiuser gaming. In F.
Mäyrä (Ed.), Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference (pp. 35-44). Tampere,
Finland: Tampere University Press.
Svahn, M. (2005). Future-proofing Advergaming: A Systematisation for the Media Buyer. Proceedings of
the Second Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, 123, 187-191. ACM International
Conference Proceeding Series, 123. Creativity and Cognition Studios Press: Sydney, Australia.
UNCLE ROY ALL AROUND YOU. (2003). Nottingham University, UK: Blast Theory and The Mixed
Reality Lab.
Vogiazou, Y., Raijmakers, B., Geelhoed, E., Reid, J., & Eisenstadt, M. (2006). Design for emergence:
Experiments with a mixed reality urban playground game. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11,
45-58.

Adriana de Souza e Silva is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication at North Carolina
State University (NCSU) and the director of the Mobile Gaming Research Lab (http://mglab.chass.ncsu.edu).
She is also a faculty member of the Science, Technology and Society Program at NCSU and co-author of the
book Digital Cityscapes: Merging digital and urban playspaces, by Peter Lang (2009). In 2004/2005, she was
a senior researcher at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSE&IS) at
CRESST (Center for the Study of Evaluation). Adriana holds a PhD in communication and culture from the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. From 2001 to 2004 she was a visiting scholar at the UCLA
Department of Design|Media Arts. Her research focuses on how new media (mobile) interfaces change our
relationship to space and create new social environments via media art and hybrid reality games. She
obtained a master’s degree in communication and image technology from the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil. Contact: NCSU Dept of Communication, 201 Winston Hall, Campus Box 8104, Raleigh, NC
27695-8104, USA; +1 919-515-9736 (t); +1 919-515-9456 (f); souzaesilva@ncsu.edu.

Larissa Hjorth is researcher, artist, and senior lecturer in the Games and Digital Art Programs at RMIT
University, Australia. From 2009, Hjorth will be an Australian Research Council APD fellow conducting
 de Souza e Silva, Hjorth / A Historical Approach to Mobile Games   625

a 3-year cross-cultural case study of online communities in six locations (Manila, Singapore, Shanghai,
Seoul, Tokyo, and Melbourne) in the region (with Michael Arnold). Since 2000, Hjorth has been research-
ing and publishing on gendered customizing of mobile communication, gaming, and virtual communities
in the Asia-Pacific, which is outlined in her book Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (London, Routledge).
Hjorth has published widely on the topic in journals such as Convergence, Journal of Intercultural
Studies, Continuum, ACCESS, Fibreculture, and Southern Review. In 2007, she co-convened the
International Mobile Media conference with Gerard Goggin (www.mobilemedia2007.net) and the
Interactive Entertainment (IE) conference with Esther Milne (www.ie.rmit.edu.au). She is currently writ-
ing an undergraduate textbook on gaming as new media for Berg (series editors Leslie Haddon and Nicola
Green) and has just finished editing two Routledge anthologies—Games of Locality: Gaming Cultures in
the Asia-Pacific (with Dean Chan) and Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunication to Media (with
Gerard Goggin). Larissa is a regularly invited speaker at international conferences on mobile media, Asia-
Pacific popular culture, new media, and ICTs. Contact: C/O School of Creative Media, RMIT University,
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 3000; larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au.