Consuming Place through Location‐Based Games

The proliferation of mobile digital technologies and their infrastructures, most prominently in the Global North, has provided novel interfaces for urban consumption over the past two decades. These technological changes have enabled people to engage with information communicated in real time through devices connected to the internet, geolocated via GPS satellites and containing a range of sensors (cameras, microphones, accelerometers, magnetometers, etc.), while simultaneously being positioned in, and interacting with, physical places. One popular form of urban consumption activity that these affordances have supported is location-based gaming: the playing of games that incorporate the player's physical location and/or actions into the activity through media interfaces. Drawing upon the example of a popular, global-scale, commercial location-based game (Pokémon GO) and a location-based game I developed for a retail district in a single, small UK city (The Timekeeper's Return), I unpack the implications of engaging with place through location-based games for urban consumption. I do this by identifying two key modalities of place-based consumption that location-based games provoke: one driven by the exchange and commodification of place-specific data through the gameplay, and one driven by drawing attention towards places’ attributes as unique and desirable features of commercial environments. I end the chapter by discussing how designers and players of commercialised location-based games engage with place in ways that resist or diverge from logics of consumption. Altogether, I show how these different modalities of urban consumption are produced by inter-relationships between navigation and narrative that unfold through the design and play of location-based games.