The Uses of a Geo-localized Mobile Game in Japan

“Seing” one another onscreen and the construction of social order in mobile-based augmented public space by Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005).

In this paper (that follows this one) the authors present a case study about the use of Mogi-Mogi, a geo-localized mobile game in Japan. They analize how “seing” one another onscreen and geographical closeness it entails become a pretext to start text-messaging exchanges and face-to-face meeting.

Mogi-Mogi is indeed the first advanced, somehow popular (around 1000 users) geo-localized game that could provide a glimpse of what the experience of living in a mobile-based augmented urban public space might be like. It is a great example on how context-sensitive mobile service closely binds technical protocols to social ones, especially those governing interactions in the public sphere.

Confirming mutual proximity
Onscreen encounters make the mobile screen a new type of public space, one of mutual visibility and mediated co-presence, accessible to all players. It was observed the first turn of text-message interaction is an invitation to confirm the mutual proximity:

The opening of the interaction by an adjacent pair oriented towards enunciation and confirmation of the participants’ mutual proximity is a conventional mechanism of openness characteristics of interactions in the geo-localized public space of Mogi.

Publicizing spatial position
The analysis shows that players reflexively oriented themselves towards publicizing their spatial position in order to develop specific formats of conversational openness. They cooporerated to align or desalign incorporated “situation” and screen “situations”.

Polite inattention
I enjoy the definition of “polite inattention”: strangers acknowledging each other presence without engaging into an interaction.

Uncertainty
On the side, this papers mentions a couple the technological pitfalls that influence the experience:

• The rapidity of these connections with the game server is critical as regards to the acceptability of the game. At certain times the connection time ranged from 30 seconds to one minute, which was experience as a real problem by players
• In explaining the “invitation to confirm the mutual proximity”, the authors mention “It can be mobilized again during use of the device in the form of a background of shared expectations concerning the more or less robust way in which the screen representations relate to a real location and can simultaneously be visible to other connected players”