Indigenous Cartographies: Pervasive Games and Place-Based Storytelling

Abstract

With the rise of pervasive games in the last two decades, peaking with Pokémon GO, questions surrounding the perceptions, use, and ownership of public space have rapidly emerged. Beyond commercial and public uses of city spaces, how are such experiences attentive to local, regional, cross-cultural, ancient, and persistent notions of place? How can locative and pervasive experiences respond to local and Indigenous understandings of place? Perhaps most decisively, what is the compatibility of ancient and Indigenous stories of sustainability set within rapidly obsolete frameworks of the latest mobile devices? In considering these questions, this article reviews the current literature on Indigenous pervasive games and discusses an augmented reality audio-game that features Australian First Nations’ stories of land, river, and sky. Players of the game are transformed into wayfarers as they move across the landscape to uncover alternate and pre-settlement cartographies bringing new insights to familiar territory.

Reworlding: Urban Play as Method for Exploring Alternate Social Imaginaries

“…During 2018-2019, the design of Wayfinder Live was redeveloped for the TIMeR Audiowalk (Briggs et al, 2019;Guntarik et al, 2023) to situate Boonwurrung knowledge and stories (Briggs, 2014) held by N'arweet Carolyn Briggs directly in relation to the urban environments with the RMIT University campus at the northern end of the Melbourne CBD. In this design the Wayfinder Live map screen was replaced with a collection of branching sites linked by audio tracks so that the player is situated within the cartography of the experience directly.…”

The Role of Audio in Immersive Storytelling: a Systematic Review in Cultural Heritage

“…The most common tracking method (55 papers) selects and personalises audio and video content based on head orientation and position in space, especially in indoor situations. In all outdoor experiences, GPS is used along with compass sensors [55,56,79,108,109,122,135,136,138], otherwise tracking is left unspecified [77,134,138]. GPS is also used in one interactive artwork described "called Hybrid Gifts" [161] in which a smartphone app permits museum visitors to communicate by geolocated audio messages with peers in order to express and transmit their emotions while looking at paintings in a museum.…”