This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016;Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016;Mishra, 2016) to the role of mobile media in commodifying (Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of play (Isbister, 2016;Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and game theorists in this commentary highlight, the game sits at the nexus of several technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn; the ubiquity of location-based and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our individual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes; the increasing importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the ongoing augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid experience of the lifeworld.

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In this article, we explore the material, sensory and corporeal aspects of digital ethnography, primarily in the context of mobile media use in the domestic environment. We align our methodological approach to the ‘sensory turn’ in theory, situated loosely under the rubric of new materialism, and outline the insights that a post-phenomenological method can offer. Drawing from our current research into everyday media use conducted within Australian households, which involved a range of data collection methods aimed at capturing the embodiment of mobile media, we explore the significance of play in and around haptic interfaces. Mobile games are evidently integral to our embodied ways of knowing, and there are a number of challenges faced by the mobile media researcher who seeks to document, understand and interpret this contemporary cultural and everyday practice.

This paper examines the hybrid ontologies that typify networked and mobile location-based games, exploring some of the phenomenological, embodied or somatic aspects of the practices and perceptions of 'mixed reality' game-play. In particular, it focuses on the potential cultural and corporeal effects of mobile gaming since the introduction of the iPhone and subsequent touchscreens, and the specific technosomatic arrangements such devices demand in everyday life. Mobile media and game-play in both urban and domestic places evoke particular kinds of embodiment, indicative of emergent habitual and quotidian behaviours, gesturings, positionings and choreographies of the body, at times partially determined by the culture of the user, at others by the technical specificities and demands of the interface. Location-based mobile games and applications also modify our experience and perception of 'being online', and effectively disassemble the actual/virtual dichotomy of internet 'being' into a complex and dynamic range of modalities of presence. Finally, this paper suggests that the kind of ontological and 'containment' metaphors we use to describe the space of screen-based gameplay -in particular, the magic circle, and tropologies of the screen as a fixed window or frame -are ill-suited as descriptors for the complex layering of material and virtual contexts specific to mobile location-based and mixed reality gaming.