The hybrid ontology of mobile gaming

Abstract

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.

Assemblage, adaptation and apps: Smartphones and mobile gaming

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“…Key to this process is an understanding of the complex socio-technical implications of convergence. Summarizing the work of Jenkins (2006), Richardson (2011) writes that convergence needs to be understood as a term used to describe technological change and the interplay between old/traditional and 'new' media. More importantly, Richardson goes on to note that convergence is both a 'dynamic' and 'unstable' process where 'differing modes of engaging with the same or similar content intersect in complex ways' and that 'the remediation of older forms of media into newer and mobile devices is a process of dynamic interplay between medium specificity and convergence, complexly embedded in the usability and intuitiveness of the interface' (421).…”

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

“…Indeed, with today's mobile technologies, the use of the Internet is not only circumscribed to gazing into a domestic computer monitor. Instead, the proliferation of mobile media blur the boundaries of online and offline modes of interaction (Richardson 2011;Moores 2012). Subsequently, Web Vaike Fors pages, applications, and other platforms we might engage with online "are not simply bounded visual landscapes that can be sensed as virtual places.…”

City knights: Spatial realism and memorability of virtual game scenes in pervasive gameplay

“…Spatial expansion is an intrinsic quality in pervasive games [1], which may take place both in physical and virtual arenas and span through the globe [28]. The characteristics of space, location or "hybrid space" [31] become even more meaningful when pervasive games are location based. We suggest there is a gap in knowledge on the role of spatial realism of virtual scenes in the context of pervasive games and particularly at the point of transition between the two realms, physical and virtual.…”