The Place of the Mobile Play: Camera Phone Play and Gamified Locative Media
Hjorth examines the shift from first- to second-generation locative media practices and how its relationship to shifting camera-phone practices is creating new ways for representing place, place-making, and play. Specifically, the chapter reflects how cam
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The Place of the Mobile Play: Camera Phone Play and Gamified Locative Media Larissa Hjorth
INTRODUCTION In a busy café in Seoul’s Shinchon area, a young woman drinks coffee. Far from bored or lonely, Soo touches her smartphone like an old friend. After “checking in” on Facebook to show others where she is, she begins to explore her various smartphone photo apps. Soo used to take selfportraits (sel-ca) and upload them to Korea’s oldest social network site, Cyworld minihompy. However, with the rise of location-aware media like Facebook and Foursquare, she feels less compelled to share images of herself; instead she creates different images of her location. The rise of locative media, characterized as using Global Positioning Systems (GPS), can be viewed as part of smartphone convergence with mobile and social media. Locative media reminds us that places are, as Doreen Massey (2005) notes, stories so far, by the ways in which they overlay and entangle information and media with location. Sharing these ambient images among physically absent yet electronically co-present friends gives her
L. Hjorth (*) School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
© The Author(s) 2016 A. Fung (ed.), Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy, Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40760-9_13
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comfort and joy. The sharing allows her to share moments—emotional gestures in a particular time and space—with friends in other co-present spaces. So, while Soo is in café she also inhabits online spaces whereby physically absent friends are “absent presences” (Gergen, 2002). These new co-present visualities are entangled within emergent locative media narratives. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Machiko is reading a keitai shōsetsu (mobile novel) as she rides the train from work. She is happy to see that her favorite author has released a new novel. She wants to share the excitement and quickly sends the link to her best friend, Mariko, using the Japanese social media, Mixi. Mariko immediately replies with a smiley face and both girls read the story simultaneously while occupying two different spaces. In an ambiguity common to social, locative, and mobile media, they are both together apart. Alternatively, for young adult Toshi, in post 3.11 Japan he has taken to using gamified locative media, similar to Foursquare, so that he and his friends might always know where each other are. This friendly watching gives Toshi and his friends and family a sense of comfort. Over in Shanghai, Jia misses her daughter, Bao, who has just moved away to university. Before she left, Bao installed the most up to date software on her mum’s “pirate” smartphone (shanzhai). As instructed by her mum, Bao also signed her up for social media games like the farm simulation, Happy Farm. Each day Jia logs onto China’s version of Facebook, Renren, and logs onto Happy Farm. Seeing that Bao is not online protecting her crops, Jia uses the most popular instant messenger (IM), QQ, to send Bao a message. For Bao, typic
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