Exploring the Playfulness of Places: A Case Study of Sydney, Australia
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‘Exploring the Playfulness of Places: A Case Study of Sydney, Australia’ presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, The University of Sydney, 14-17 December, 2016.
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Exploring the Playfulness of Places: A Case Study of Sydney, Australia
- 1. The University of Sydney Page 1 Exploring the Playfulness of Place A Case Study of Sydney, Australia Kyle Moore PhD Candidate, Department of Media and Communications Twitter: @kylejmoore Crossroads in Cultural Studies Sydney, Australia 17 December 2016
- 2. The University of Sydney Page 2 Towards a Theorisation of ‘Situated Play’ – Urban play as a culturally specific practice that operates at the intersection of global and local. – Play is subject to sociocultural and material circumstance outside of the game. – Draws from HCI (situated actions) and cultural studies of games (situated gaming).
- 3. The University of Sydney Page 3 Historical and Contemporary Approaches – Historical approaches to urban play – de Souza e Silva and Hjorth (2009) – Stevens (2007) – Flanagan (2009) – Emphasis on ‘remediating’ critical engagements with urban space e.g. – Flâneur (urban wanderer) – Derive (unplanned journey) – Context of these two; not strictly play, although informed by in some ways. – Ideas of ‘leisure’ tied with urban mobility – Becomes a question of politics, of accessibility, of sociocultural constructions of space and consumption
- 4. The University of Sydney Page 4 Playable and Playful Cities – Art movements that seek to ‘open’ the urban to civic and social interactions – Questions of culture and questions of play. Where is culture produced and how is play performed? – Playable city as historically situated amongst ideas that emerge from New Games Movement – E.g. civic modes of urban mobility with emphasis on the social – New technologies allow for new modes of performance. – These forms of play are ultimately performative – Reliant on ‘open’ urban spaces. Often city centres and plays of traditional cultural production (at least in case of Australia)
- 5. The University of Sydney Page 5 Ingress and Pokémon Go – Objects of study – Ingress (2012) – Communities in and around Sydney, Australia – Pokémon Go (2016) – Field testers – Launch of public app and viral adoption – Ethnographic study of Ingress communities – Syd Resistance Agents Feb-June 2016
- 6. The University of Sydney Page 6 Playing in Public: Sydney Australia
- 7. The University of Sydney Page 7 Playing in Public: Sydney Australia
- 8. The University of Sydney Page 8 Mapping Art: Curation and Labour
- 9. The University of Sydney Page 9 Art, Play, and Situating Localities – Cultural heritage, history, developing a ‘playful’ locality – playing with heritage and our understanding of the (sub)urban. – Observations from Sydney: sites of traditional ‘cultural’ production e.g. Opera House and Museums, key sites of urban play. – Home to not only Ingress (map and events), Pokémon Go, but also other forms of playful urban mobility such as Vivid Light festival. – Outside of urban centres, suburbs curate specific cultural heritage and production. From street art in those proximate to city centre to war memorials in parks in locations furthest from city centre.
- 10. The University of Sydney Page 10 Conclusion: Politics of Public Play – Situated play helps to understand now only how play alters sociocultural and material components of the city. – Play may be subversive, a mode of consumption, a form of labour, a unifying practice, depending on given situation. – In short, play is political – Public play deals with and alters existing politics surrounding urban accessibility and everyday forms of urban mobility. – In the context of Australia, localities are tied to built environment and performance of cultural heritage. – As with all locations, issues of accessibility and openness of public spaces impact politics of game play
Editor's Notes
- In this paper I consider some of the politics of location-based gaming, namely the tensions between games and art that emerge in a few key games. I aim to understand location based games as a form of situated play – a form of play that deals explicitly with social, cultural, and material circumstance of the urban environments in which they are played. As such, these games are played in public, and deal with a distinct political practice, tied up with ideas of leisure, appropriate use of public space and technology, performativity, and immaterial labour. In my research I focus primarily on Ingress, specific playing Ingress in the context of Sydney Australia, as well as some preliminary ideas surrounding Pokemon Go – both games which are developed by Niantic Labs, a former subsidiary of Google Incorporated (now Alphabet). The idea of ‘localising’ comes from an attempt to understand how play is situated within and across multiple localities, all which come with a distinct set of politics which may or may not be altered by play, but certainly impact how we may play in public.
- In my research, I develop the concept of situated play. I draw this concept from the field of human computer action, cultural studies, and also to some extent from the study of games and literacy and the concept of situated learning. I suggest that these forms of location-based games or urban mobile gaming are best thought of as situated practices, as drawing from and dealing with specific sociocultural and material circumstance of the urban. This is more than just the idea that the city becomes altered and becomes the space of which play is conducted. Rather, we need to pay attention to the specific forms of urban mobility, of which play should be considered one. Secondly, we need to consider how these forms of playful urban mobility been historically situated within the urban (my next slide). Ultimately, situated play draws from these ideas, but it is also a practice – that is, it is a process of learning and making meaning. We develop new shared and contested understandings of urban space and urban play. Here, I draw from firstly Lucy Suchman’s notion of situated actions – that all engagements with technology are subject to external processes of meaning making, and sociocultural and material circumstances. Secondly, I draw from Paul Dourish’s expansion of this work and inclusion of situated learning, the idea that these contexts foster a certain type of social learning – a process of generating and legitimising new meaning of these spaces and actions;. Lastly, I suggest that the location of these new meanings may not be specifically tied to distinct ‘local’ spaces, but subject to larger global gaming cultural practices which need to be understood in terms of the inter-relation between global and local – the way that play in Sydney may be subject to external and global focuses as well as those distinctly local practices and materialities.
- These approaches help us to understand a ‘global’ and historical sense of playful urban mobility They also help us to understand the tensions between urban mobility, leisure, and production – the ways in which urban spaces are constantly undergoing contested and shifting process of meaning making, and how an everyday (or rather, a distinct) urban mobility may be a political action – an act of subversion. This is not to say that all play indeed acts as a subversion – of course, contemporary digital play may in fact be considered a mode of consumption. It is difficult to know how these tensions may emerge. As such, I think we need to be careful of drawing too close a comparison between these historical forms of urban mobility, and understand them as existing within distinct tensions between forms of mobility, consumption, and production.
- This is fairly straight forward – we are understanding ‘open’ in sense of functional civic responsibility – and a politics of asking what spaces can actually be open – that city centres and so forth lend towards the movement of people, and interacting with built environments – e.g. photos, tourism, everyday urban mobility etc.
- I want to also, discuss notions of cultural heritage and art here too. The opera house is important for a number of reasons – it’s iconography, it’s role as a location of cultural production/consumption, and lastly the way it gets intergrated into the material/software system of games like Ingress and Pokemon go. There is a distinct meaning making process that is bound to the materiality of the game it self – that the software is in itself user generated – portals were submitted by users during early stages – so there is something at stake here about how these sites came to be included in the sociocultural practices of urban play. The question of how one constructs new meaning for these locations is one of interest. It builds heavily from the structure of the game which is in turn a co-production, a co-cartography, between developers and players.
- Creating meaning via community and social input – situational learning (to an extent) Shared meaning is generated and reinforced via social play. Key sites become attractive, due to their existing sociocultural standing. Asking, why the Opera House was the key location for anomaly is interesting, but also seems almost evident. It’s iconography, it’s spreadability and social capital in extending play beyond the immediate network of the game e.g. via social media. This site is also of interest, as it was one of the first places in Sydney to attract a large number (100s) of Pokemon Go players for an informal ‘poke walk’ The role this site has in pre-urban play cultural heritage becomes equally important, even if the site itself is divided up into interactive nodes and overlays of information. The site itself retains it’s original role, while, through social interaction, new forms of meaning and interaction are legitimised.
- Here, there is room to discuss how art becomes firstly incorporated into playable maps, and secondly, how these maps exist as proprietary objects, and are re-used in new games, like Pokemon Go. The politics of access and exclusion then become tied up with the question of who gets to contribute to these maps, and who becomes represented in them. There is a specific identity that becomes tied to localities, which were constructed via the process of immaterial labour on the part of early game adopters. Thinking about firstly, what art or elements of the built environment become included in the game, and then furthermore what are the politics of these forms of art? The politics of street art, as a subversive form of engaging with the urban environment, then included in new forms and modes of consumption via commercial location based games, for instance.