Playful Mapping in the Digital

PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL PLAYFUL AGE THE PLAYFUL MAPPING COLLECTIVE A SERIES OF READERS PUBLISHED BY THE INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES ISSUE NO.: 21 INSTITUTE OF NETWORK CULTURES PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL THE AGEPLAYFUL MAPPING COLLECTIVE 2 THEORY ON DEMAND Theory on Demand #21 Playful Mapping in the Digital Age Authors: Playful Mapping Collective (Clancy Wilmott, Chris Perkins, Sybille Lammes, Sam Hind, Alex Gekker, Emma Fraser, Daniel Evans) Editorial support: Miriam Rasch Copy-editing: Leonieke van Dipten Cover Design: Katja van Stiphout Design: Leonieke van Dipten EPUB development: Leonieke van Dipten Printer: Print on demand Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2016 ISBN: 978-94-92302-13-7 Contact Institute of Network Cultures Phone: +3120 5951865 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.networkcultures.org This publication is available through various print on demand services. For more information, and a freely downloadable PDF: http://networkcultures.org/publications This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoD- erivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: THE PLAYFUL MAPPING COLLECTIVE 3 CONTENTS Preface 4 Acknowledgements 11 1. An Introduction to Playful Mapping in the Digital Age Sybille Lammes and Chris Perkins 12 2. GoGoGozo: The Magic of Playful Mapping Moments Sybille Lammes, Chris Perkins and Clancy Wilmott 28 3. Locating Play in Cartographical Interfaces Sybille Lammes and Clancy Wilmott 44 4. Hybrid Clubs?: Playing with Golf Mapping Chris Perkins 56 5. 'Outsmarting Traffic, Together': Driving as Social Navigation Alex Gekker and Sam Hind 78 6. Territorial Determinism: Police Exercises, Training Spaces and Manoeuvres Sam Hind 94 7. From Underground to the Sky: Navigating Verticality Through Play Emma Fraser and Clancy Wilmott 114 8. (Mini) Mapping the Game-Space: A Taxonomy of Control Alex Gekker 134 Biographies 156 4 THEORY ON DEMAND PREFACE Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, developed a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas. As such, we explore a reflexive archaeology of how such ideas progressed – a process that is almost never foregrounded in academic texts2, yet can explain and inform their outcomes tremendously. It explores our writing practice, the gradual steps through which texts have emerged, and the need for a collaborative acknowledgment of this process. This, we would argue, should be regarded as a necessary and radical move, in order to counter the dominance in academia of the single-author text. This dominance sees the erasure of shared, cognitive, technical and administrative labor, and the value in collaborative, generative work. It also underscores the diminishing value of generosity in sharing and playing with ideas, a loss which is realized in the still inadequate addressing of non-academic, but interested and engaged, audiences. This preface also situates the relationships between the different authorial voices engaged in this project. These links emerge in the qualitative, collegiate and friendly side-effects of ongoing collaboration, in the honest account of intertwining funded research projects and other related research and ideas developed during our ongoing work together. Therefore, the form of this publication is reiterated in the fluidity and contestation of ideas embodied in this book – and agreements and arguments are expanded into an ongoing, archival volume. Following the ideas In 2008, Sybille Lammes3 focused on video-games as a genre through which spatial stories might be enacted. She consequently argued for a performative analysis of the spatial and situated game assemblage, and the emerging links between playing and mapping. Similarly, from 2006, Chris Perkins4 had begun to research broader synergies between maps and play that he demonstrated through a case analysis of the game of golf. Evidently, there 1 For information about these various activities see http://www.digitalcartography.eu/. 2 For a reflexive exception to this generalization see http://www.followthethings.com/peerreview.shtml. 3 Sybille Lammes, ‘Spatial Regimes of the Digital Playground: Cultural Functions of Spatial Practices in Computer Games,’ Space and Culture 11, no. 3 (2008): 260–72. 4 Chris Perkins, ‘Mapping Golf: A Contextual Study,’ The Cartographic Journal, 43, no. 3 (2006): 208–23 and, ‘Playing with Maps’, in Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins (eds) Rethinking Maps, London: Taylor and Francis, 2009, pp.167-188. PLAYFUL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: THE PLAYFUL MAPPING COLLECTIVE 5 was already a commonality of interest in relational approaches to knowledge and in the processes through which ideas coalesce and gain currency. From November 2012, three PhD students became partners in the developing Charting the Digital project – Clancy Wilmott in Manchester, Alex Gekker in Utrecht and Sam Hind in Warwick. Their respective research projects came to fruition at almost the very time when we were all bringing the playful mapping project together. Two other collective members became involved at later stages in the project – Emma Fraser during the writing of her shared chapter with Clancy Wilmott and the pulling together of this book into a consistent whole, and Dan Evans during the process of editing the book in the final push towards publication. From the outset of Charting the Digital, a collaborative ethos developed in which collectiv- ity prevailed over hierarchy. We found this a highly productive and inspiring way of doing research. This is reflected in shared publications, shared bids, shared workshop organiza- tion, shared reading groups and frequent team meetings at conferences, workshops and other venues across Europe and beyond. Working collaboratively is by no means smooth and univocal at all times. There are competing demands on time from collective members at different career stages. There are likewise different skill sets, motivations and interests. Such differences in opinion can result in lively, yet fruitful, discussions. Inevitable challenges included how to make sure that these voices were integrated in the design, implementation and delivery of final texts. During this period, there were also often issues in staging and streamlining writing processes. What is, however, shared is a commitment to collaboration and to incorporating different voices. Rocking the Boat In earlier experiments, we had taken the decision to write an article arising out of one of our workshops by using a process similar to how a relay-race functions. In this manner, each author took a turn, passing the writing ‘baton’ on to the next person, forming an iterative loop. Sometimes authors held on to the ‘baton’ longer, or shared a sequential lead together, before passing the text on to another to continue.5 We learned that six people can find it challenging to collaborate directly in a piece. Whilst a larger project might usefully enroll multiple voices, it is important to reduce direct collaboration to smaller numbers for any one part of this process. Working in this fashion allows for pragmatism, whilst not detracting from the responsibility of the piece as residing with the whole. We also realized that being in the same place at the same time can help enormously to keep the writing process going, making it easier to cross-check the developments of each other's ideas. Running together works better, we concluded. We therefore experimented with a novel form of shared writing that took these insights on board. A series of ‘book sprints’6 were held in which the team came together at different 5 For other approaches to collaborative writing see Ian Cook et al ‘Writing Collaboration: a Work in Progress’, https://writingcollaboration.wordpress.com (last accessed 14th November 2016). 6 Martin Kean, ‘Open Source Publishing, ‘Book Sprints’ and Possible Futures,’ Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, no. 15 (2012). 6 THEORY ON DEMAND locations to work on shared Google Docs. At these ‘sprints’, we worked on the documents in the same room at the same time. Propinquity facilitated an active exchange of ideas, but also helped to motivate us all to deliver material ‘on time’ in ways that would be harder to realize had we been collaborating remotely and sequentially on the same document. This sprinting approach was tested for another project – completing and editing a book focused on digital mapping and temporality.7 ‘Sprints’ were held in a large crumbling house in Tywyn, North Wales, in an apartment in Gozo during the Erasmus+ project, on a houseboat near to Leiden in the Netherlands, in an old tearoom in Buxton, Derbyshire, a holiday home in Greenwich, south London, a hotel in Amsterdam, and in a cottage in the Cotswolds,

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