PhD thesis

This thesis examines how people engage with place through location-based games. Location-based games are those that incorporate the player’s physical location and/or actions into the gameplay through media interfaces. Despite growing in popularity over the past two decades, there is an absence of fine-grained ethnographic research into everyday practices and emplaced experiences of location-based game design and play.

 

The contributions of this thesis are built upon three years of practice-based, autoethnographic participation in developing location-based games, alongside ethnographic observation, interviews and focus groups with creative collaborators and players. Its findings unpack how engagement with place unfolds through the design and play of location-based games and the implications of these processes for how we understand place as a concept today. In doing so, it builds upon scholarship concerning locative and mobile media, interfaces, play, digital narratives, games and philosophies of place.​

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Get in touch if you'd like to read a copy of this thesis:

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Watch a brief summary of my research findings here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Learn about design techniques for engaging with place through games and other interactive or site-specific experiences:

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Learn about the three games developed as part of this research:

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