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A Technocultural Ethnography of Pervasive Gaming Dan Dixon

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A Technocultural Ethnography of Pervasive Gaming Dan Dixon PLAYING WITH REALITY: A TECHNOCULTURAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF PERVASIVE GAMING DAN DIXON A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol August 2016 1 Abstract Pervasive games are an experimental game design practice that engages with technology development and everyday space. Tese experiences range from technology experiments to avant-garde performances to explorative urban play. Tis PhD is an ethnographic exploration of two questions. First, how did the technocultural situation of pervasive games shape their history and future? Secondly, how does this technocultural situation shape and affect the enactment (the design, play and performance) and the core experience? Tis thesis is comprised of ethnographic research carried out at pervasive gaming festivals, analysis of games and interviews with designers, artists and technologists working in the field. It reflects a historical situation in an emerging and dynamic field of practice. Te work develops a set of methods that use the concepts of liminality, materiality and practice to inform an assemblage of data gathering and analysis techniques that are specifically intended to engage with new technocultural forms. Tis is intended to deliver an understanding of these forms in a wider cultural relationship as well as give insight into how they are experienced. It uncovers a framework of tensions that explain the underlying nature of the play experience and design of pervasive games. Te research uncovers overlooked aspects of the practice of pervasive gaming. Firstly the ways in which the social and cultural background of the players and designers moulds the form, content and meta-narrative of these games. Secondly that the overlooked, and often unexpected or invisible, materiality of these games shapes the ways in which they have developed. Te often unconsidered physical materials of the games take on rich and vital meanings through design and play. Te relationship between designer and the mesh of object agencies have led the practice in unexpected directions and charted a trajectory away from technology experiment and into experience design exploration. It is in this wider context of the design of experiences that the practice will have the longest-term impact. 2 Acknowledgements My heartfelt thanks goes out to all those who have helped me along the way. Firstly to Professor Jon Dovey, my Director of Studies, for his support, continued interest and enthusiastic direction. Also a big thanks to Sam Kinsley and Seth Giddings who were on my supervisory team early on. You helped keep me on the disciplinary straight and narrow even after you were gone. And again to Seth for helpful pointers following a final read through. A big thanks also to the Pervasive Media Studio and everyone in it for being a place for a multi-year field study but more importantly a physical and spiritual home for work and ideas. Tere is nowhere else like it in the world. Tank you to all those crazy and exciting people who designed and ran the games I’ve played, watched and been a part of. Tey were all so packed full of ideas, enthusiasm and possibilities. An especially big thank you to everyone who organised and ran events such as Come Out & Play, Hide & Seek, Igfest and You Are Go. You all did it out of love for the things you do, and they would never have happened without you. Finally, and most importantly, to Heather and Noah for sticking by me on this long journey. Thank you. 3 Table of Contents From Roku’s Reward to Robo Racers 7 1. Come Out & Play 10 2. Stickball 25 3. Design trajectories and frameworks for understanding 27 4. In this thesis 29 Chapter 1. Key Approaches: Technoculture, Material and Liminality 33 1. Ludus Incognito - the hunt for pervasive games 39 2. Imaginary games 51 3. Messy realities 53 4. Materiality 56 5. Te context of (techno)cultural studies and (experience) design research 61 6. Betwixt and between - liminal experience 68 7. Messy intersections between the technocultural imaginary and everyday lived reality 76 Chapter 2. Genealogies of Pervasive Gaming 79 1. Why is ubiquitous computing important? 80 2. A history of pervasive discontinuities 90 3. Te discourse of pervasive games 97 4. Empiricism and reality 112 Chapter 3. Outline of a Liminal Ethnography 116 1. Te ethnographic sites 120 2. Approaches and sensitivities 125 3. Methods 137 4. An ethnographic assemblage 161 4 Chapter 4. The Social Pleasures of Street Games 165 1. Spontaneous Communitas 167 2. Hipsters, Habitus and the socio-cultural community 174 3. Cool Gameplay Capitals 181 4. “Did I just play a game?” 189 5. Nostalgia 196 6. Being ‘in’ games 205 Chapter 5. Reconfiguration and Human-Material Hybrids 209 1. Functional referentiality 211 2. Reconfiguration 220 3. Human-material hybrids 229 4. Hybrid spectacles 235 Chapter 6. Enchanted Materials 240 1. Re-enchantment 243 2. Cardboard and the meaning of prototypical materials 246 3. False Moustaches and liminal props 256 4. Enchanted Streets 261 5. Re-enchanting the everyday 278 Chapter 7. Invisible Materials 281 1. Festivals 282 2. Rules 290 3. Invisible technologies 301 4. Invisible tensions 317 Chapter 8. A Framework for Understanding Pervasive Games 320 1. Tensions: the space of design and experimentation 323 2. Wider Implications 358 3. Te future of pervasive game studies 370 Afterword 382 References 384 1. Bibliography 384 2. Ludography 401 3. Other creative works 403 5 Table of Figures Figure 1: Immaterials: Light painting Wi-Fi 87 Figure 2: Te mixed reality spectrum 107 Figure 3: Te 9 x 60 minute tapes used for collecting video data 144 Figure 4: Field note examples. 151 Figure 5: Te author running Robo Racers 154 Figure 6: Brooklyn Lyceum 201 Figure 7: Bunting at Hide & Seek 2010 202 Figure 8: Suitcase and decorations at Hide & Seek 2010 202 Figure 9: Bike Maypole at Igfest 2011 203 Figure 10: Humanoid Asteroid at Come Out & Play 2010 203 Figure 11: Screenshot of Kaboom! the computer game 216 Figure 12: Photograph of the live-action re-staging of Kaboom! 216 Figure 13: Player tilting buckets to catch balloon, with queue of players waiting behind him. 222 Figure 14: The Comfort of Strangers 225 Figure 15: PacManhattan player. Dressed as PacMan and on phone to report position. 228 Figure 16: First iteration of Can You See Me Now? runner equipment 250 Figure 17: Final iteration of Can You See Me Now? runner equipment. 251 Figure 18: The One - Instruction sheet 262 Figure 19: The One - game area in Brooklyn 264 Figure 20: The One - game area in Berlin 264 All images creative commons or used with permission of author/publisher. If not specified, then image/figure is author’s own. 6 Foreword From Roku’s Reward to Robo Racers In 2006 Hewlett-Packard created a vision video called Roku’s Reward1 to show the possibilities of mixing computer games with ubiquitous computing technology. In this two-minute film we see a (completely fabricated) location-based game using augmented reality, played across a recognisable San Francisco, with real, synchronous players and live, physically present actors, using a device that appears to be something similar to (what is now referred to as) smartphone technology (unavailable at the time). Te game seamlessly mixes a medieval fantasy, computer game-inspired, onscreen world with the seemingly mundane physical reality around the player. Te challenges, structures and imagery of the game are heavily based in computer gaming. Te technology is straight out of the mobile and ubiquitous computing research agendas of the time. Tis imaginary game seamlessly interweaves the virtual and the actual, technology and the physical. 1. At the time Hewlett-Packard was one of the key industrial investors in ubiquitous computing research. One of the first pervasive games, Pirates!, was played at HP’s research facility in Bristol, at a conference on handheld computing in 1999. 7 Vision videos are means for research institutions, largely corporate, to politically anticipate and affect future technology development (Kinsley, 2010). Tey can represent strategic aims, influence research direction, and cross institutional boundaries. As such, Roku’s Reward is a rich site for analysis and comes at a critical point. Tis video, produced in 2006, encapsulates the ideologies of what many involved in the development of ubiquitous computing and gaming, in the year 2000, thought pervasive gaming might evolve to be. Tat it would take computer gaming relatively unchanged into the physical world. Tis was the vision for pervasive games at the outset. But by 2006 it was already six years too late and considered an anachronism. Te researchers and designers involved had already identified the problems with seamless experiences, the unpredictability of technical solutions in the physical world, the deep complexity of reality, the tyranny of screens and the confusing fuzziness between the virtual, the actual, the physical and the imaginary. In 2011 I ran a game called Robo Racers, at Igfest; the Bristol-based street gaming festival. In a street closed off for the festival, the game had six people in three pairs, dressed in oversized, restrictive, cardboard robot costumes; one a robot maze-runner and the other their robot trainer. One of the pair, the trainer can see the other, the racer, on screen, via a top-down, cheap, low resolution, Wi-Fi- networked digital camera. Te trainers need to direct the racers through a cardboard maze overlaid on the screen. Te pairs can only communicate via walkie-talkies. Te object of the game for the trainer to coach the runner through 8 the maze that only the trainer can see.
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