Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces

The book Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces has been released recently. The description goes as follows:

The convergence of smartphones, GPS, the Internet, and social networks has given rise to a playful, educational, and social media known as location-based and hybrid reality games. The essays in this book investigate this new phenomenon and provide a broad overview of the emerging field of location-aware mobile games, highlighting critical, social scientific, and design approaches to these types of games, and drawing attention to the social and cultural implications of mobile technologies in contemporary society. With a comprehensive approach that includes theory, design, and education, this edited volume is one of the first scholarly works to engage the emerging area of multi-user location-based mobile games and hybrid reality games.

It features a chapter I co-authored with Nicolas discussing the issues for the design of Location-Based Games based on our experience with CatchBob!. We give an overview of the three main design issues our results supported: the role played by physical features, the importance of the technological infrastructure and finally the user experience of location-awareness of others.

Why do I blog this: After Space Time Play, it is clear that studying ubiquitous games has consequences for many other areas of contemporary research and daily experience.