Localizing Location-Based Gaming: Situating Australian Urban Play

This paper, a conference proceedings contribution by Kyle Moore of the University of Sydney, argues for "situated play" as a conceptual tool for understanding everyday practices of location-based gaming in urban environments, with particular attention to Australian contexts. It positions urban mobile games such as Niantic's Ingress and Blast Theory's Uncle Roy All Around You within a lineage of playful urban mobility, including the Situationist International's dérive, Huizinga's conception of play, the New Games Movement, and the Playable City art movement. The central aim is to move beyond understanding such games primarily as spatial or temporal phenomena and to attend to the localized, situated cultures in which they are played.

The paper's theoretical argument distinguishes between global and local dimensions of play, drawing on Shira Chess's reading of Ingress as an articulation of global and regional knowledge and on Apperley's account of play within a global media ecology. It contends that urban play occupies a tension between Western conceptions of the city as functional space and as playful space, and it frames historical playful urban mobility as an activity that resembles play rather than play in itself. Through this lens, the author proposes that urban play can function as a critical and subversive reading of urban space as a site of capitalist functionality, while also serving a civic and social purpose in the tradition of public play design.

The discussion is oriented toward several critical questions: the power dynamics embedded in how cities define cultural production versus leisure, the spaces and activities that are recognized as legitimate sites of play, and who is able to participate in and shape urban mobile gaming culture. The paper's scope is theoretical and conceptual rather than empirical, drawing on key case studies and a broader body of literature in game studies, pervasive games research, and urban studies. It is presented as a continuation of the author's earlier work on urban mobile gaming, including studies published in M/C Journal and Analog Game Studies.