flâneur, a Walkthrough: Locative Literature as Participation and Play

The study examines textopia, a locative literature system in which users geotag texts that play as audio while they walk through a city, and the flâneur game built on it as a way to sustain participation in such a project. Its central concern is that user-generated content is essential to the aesthetic aims of locative literature, yet contributions do not arise simply because they are invited. An initial public writing competition in October 2008, which drew 46 submissions, offered cash prizes of around 1300 euro and attracted notable media attention, generated interest and material but did not produce lasting use of the system. The authors therefore argue that participation must be actively facilitated, and they draw on Oulipo, Rettberg, and research on game-based creativity to motivate the design of flâneur as a vehicle for ongoing engagement.

The flâneur game, run as an online and live locative experiment between 2009 and 2010, yielded modest quantitative results. Its final online round produced only 13 texts despite generally positive feedback from participants. Post-competition survey responses identified the loss of a social context as the principal obstacle to continued participation, outweighing concerns about usability or the appeal of cash rewards. Switching from a wiki to a blog tool lowered barriers to entry and drew contributions from people with no prior contact with the live events, yet this change did not produce a sustained online community. Participants were motivated more by social dimensions of play than by competition, and the game format itself was found engaging.

A consistent finding across the study is that live events generated markedly more participation and enthusiasm than the purely online game. The authors conclude that the principal value of the project lies less in literary quality than in its capacity to alter how participants perceive and interact with urban space, with the texts serving as documentary traces of that experiential activity. The study thus leaves open the question of how collaborative online writing might be combined with the liveness and co-presence needed to build a durable community around locative literature.