GPS Real World Gaming

GPS Real Gaming

Mais games com mídias locativas (via UrbanTick): “The urban environment has become a playground. Not only recently but together with the availability of mobile technology and location based information there was a steep rise of digitally supported large scale urban games. Since the mid nineties those sort of games have been developed. First by geeks and small communities, together with universities that had a computer science department. Nowadays the games slowly become commercialized…”. Abaixo vídeo do jogo fast foot que ganhou prêmio de melhor jogo móvel. O jogo usa GPS e é jogado por 4 ou 5 players em um raio de 1km. Um foge e os outros têm que pegá-lo. Simples assim.

Segue o abstract de um artigo meu que está no prelo para ser publicado no Canadian Journal of Communication sobre o tema, mostrando como as mídias locativas produzem espacialização e, no caso dos games, um reforço do uso do lugar e do espaço público das cidades pelo lúdico:

“Pervasive Computer Games (PCGs) combine digital mobile technologies and location-based systems by creating an interface between electronic and physical spaces for playing. PCG is a general name for mobile games, such as hybrid reality games (HRGs), location-based mobile games (LBMGs) and urban games. Our goal here is to show how these games; along with new digital mobile technologies have the potential to produce “spatialization”, i.e., to socially produce the space in which they are embedded . Based on the history of PCGs, the goal of this paper is to examine the forms of spatialization created by the use of location-based services and location-based technologies. The emphasis of this paper is theoretical; the data analysis is implemented to illustrate and support the theoretical background. From 2000 to 2008, I analyzed 73 PCGs to identify the forms of spatialization created. We will see that PCGs use informational territories to produce two temporary types of spatialization: 1) the use of physical space for the game (hunt and chase are the majority), and 2) the relationship between physical space and electronic spaces (location-based mobile games are the majority).”