PhD thesis
Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games: Navigation and Narrative in Game Design and Play Experiences
How do designers and players of location-based games engage with place? And what are the implications for how we understand 'place' as a concept today?
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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Watch a brief summary of my research findings here:
Learn about design techniques for engaging with place through games and other interactive or site-specific experiences:
Learn about the three games developed as part of this research:
Canterbury in 3 Words
The Timekeeper's Return
The Gates to Dreamland