Everyday life and locative play: an exploration of Foursquare and playful engagements with space and place

Foursquare is a location-based social network (LBSN) that combines gaming elements with features conventionally associated with social networking sites (SNSs). Following two qualitative studies, this article sets out to explore what impact this overlaying of physical environments with play has on everyday life and experiences of space and place. Drawing on early understandings of play, alongside the flâneur and ‘phoneur’ as respective methods for conceptualizing play in the context of mobility and urbanity, this article examines whether the suggested division between play and ordinary life is challenged by Foursquare, and if so, how this reframing of play is experienced. Second, this article investigates what effect this LBSN has on mobility choices and spatial relationships. Finally, the novel concept of the ‘phoneur’ is posited as a way of understanding how pervasive play through LBSNs acts as a mediating influence on the experience of space and place

"Get off my lawn!": Starting to understand territoriality in location based mobile games

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation information into such games. Although popular location-based games (LBGs) such as Ingress and Pokémon Go have millions of users, research still needs to be carried out to fully understand the ways in which such games impact upon a player’s interaction with other players and their physical surroundings. Consequently, there is limited knowledge on how user behavior can be addressed and drawn upon as a design resource to further engage and motivate players to play. To further understand this, we developed a LBG called CityConqueror and have conducted an in ’the wild’ study. This initial study starts to unpack the ways that human territoriality can be expressed in LBGs to facilitate player motivation, engagement and can support the integration of the game in the player’s daily life. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for LBGs. The primary purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of territoriality and the way that this can be drawn upon as a resource for design

Performing the Digital Self: Understanding Location-Based Social Networking, Territory, Space, and Identity in the City

Expressions of territoriality have been positioned as one of the main reasons users alter their behaviors and perceptions of spatiality and sociality while engaging with location-based social networks (LBSN). Despite the potential for this interplay to further our understanding of LBSN usage in the context of identity, very little work has actually been done towards this. Addressing this gap in the literature is one the chief aims of the article. Drawing on an original six-week study with 42 participants utilizing a bespoke LBSN entitled ‘GeoMoments’, our research explores: (1) the way that territoriality is linked to self-identity; and (2) how this interplay affects the interactions between users as well as the environments they inhabit. Our findings suggest that participants affirmed their self-identity by selectively posting and claiming ownership of their neighborhood through the LBSN. Here, the locative decisions made related to risk, hierarchies, and the users’ relationship to the area. This practice then led participants to discover and interact with the digital information overlaying their physical environments in a playful manner. These interactions demonstrate the perceived power structures that are facilitated by identity claims over a virtual area. In the main, our results reaffirm that territoriality is a central concept in understanding LBSN use, while also drawing attention to the temporality involved in user-to-user and user-to-place interactions pertaining to physical place mediated by LBSN

Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

Conquering the city: understanding perceptions of mobility and human territoriality in location-based mobile games

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation into video games. Popular location-based games such as Ingress or Pokémon Go have millions of users, yet little is known about how the use of such games influences the nature of a user’s interaction with other users and their physical surroundings. To investigate how location-based games are integrated into a player’s daily life, how they influence a player’s mobility through the city, their perception of places and the role of human territoriality in this context, we have developed a location-based mobile multiplayer game called CityConqueror. In this paper, we present CityConqueror and the results of a study, which has focused on participants playing the game over a period of two weeks. The findings show that location-based games can be designed to give the player the illusion of playing in the context of the “real” world rather than a virtual or hybrid game reality. Our findings also suggest that location-based games can have a strong influence on a player’s mobility and perception of urban space and that human territoriality can be expressed through location-based games. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for the design of mobile location-based games

Decentering Media Studies, Verbing the Audience: Methodological Considerations Concerning People’s Uses of Media in Urban Space

Media studies scholars are invited today to address the pervasive mediation of contemporary cities, together with researchers from human geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, and mobility studies. Current studies of people’s uses of media in urban space, in particular, could play a central role in shedding light on the mediatedness of urban daily life. Drawing on a review of this specific strand of research within the broader field of “urban media studies,” the article argues that participation in the interdisciplinary endeavor runs the risk of being hindered by overly media-centric methodological procedures. Their restrictive implications are most problematic in the taken-for-granted employment of “urban audience” and “urban media user” as key concepts in the study of how people use media in urban space. What we propose instead is to demarcate the research object by proceeding from the primary importance of urban practices. This methodological decentering of media necessitates the “verbing” of the notion of audience, thereby shifting the research focus to the activity of “audiencing” (media-related or not) and its interrelations with other urban activities

Locating Identities in Time: An examination of the Impact of Temporality on Presentations of the Self through Location-based Social networks

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one’s location. Yet, these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time. Accordingly, we focus on the first six weeks of 42 users beginning to use an LBSN we designed and named GeoMoments. Through our analysis of our users\u27 activities, we contribute to understanding identity and LBSN in two distinct ways. First, we show how LBSN users develop and perform self-identity over time. Second, we highlight the extent these temporal processes reshape the behaviors of users. Overall, our results illustrate that while a performative use of GeoMoments does evolve, this development does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it occurs within the dynamic context of everyday life, which is prompted, conditioned, and mediated by the way the affordances of GeoMoments digitally organize and archive past locational traces