Urban Gaming: Mobile Media, Spatial Practices and Everyday Play

Web-capable smartphones are rapidly becoming ubiquitous, and together with app-based media ecologies and the uptake of gamification strategies by businesses and developers, mobile games are now increasingly infused into many people’s mundane day-to-day media and communication practices. As a number of media theorists have argued, the shift to mobile interfaces, together with the emergence of user-generated content creation, participatory media, and the proliferation of game elements in social media apps and services, have brought about a playful or “lusory sensibility” en masse. This chapter explores the various modalities of mobile gaming and how mobile play is reshaping urban experience, from casual mobile games to location-based and augmented reality games. On the one hand, casual or “occasional” mobile games—played for minutes at a time and at irregular intervals—can be seen as a form of portable home entertainment that cocoons the player in public places. On the other hand, location-based augmented reality games that deploy navigational and image-capture technologies have the capacity to frame and mediate the ways we traverse, experience, share, and think about place; indeed, the digital mapping and representation of place increasingly pervades geosocial, interpersonal, and embodied experience in contemporary media culture. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of Pokémon GO as a significant “moment” in media history, through which we might critically interpret the entanglements of mobile media use, playful imaginaries, and games in quotidian urban life.