Situated Play and Mobile Gaming

"Situated Play and Mobile Gaming" examines how games played on mobile devices in everyday urban settings differ from abstract, screen-bound play. Its central claim is that mobile games, whose magic circle is permeable to real-world circumstances, offer a particularly revealing setting for studying "situated play," the transition from idealized game design to lived, unrepeatable experience. The authors ground this argument in "On the Streets," a GPS- and PDA-based urban gang game, and contend that mobile play must be understood through both its structural dimensions, such as rules and mechanics, and its contextual and intuitive dimensions, such as player experience and surrounding circumstances.

The empirical basis rests on play tests with teenage players conducted in 2006 and 2007, including a 2006 test of core mechanics and a larger 2007 study drawing on observation, communication recordings, and process data. The findings indicate that situated mobile play depends on players sensing their physical presence within the game world, on a meaningful feedback relation between their actions and outcomes, and on implicit physical social interaction. Technical latency and event-synchronization problems emerged as significant obstacles to a consistent experience. A key conclusion is that the magic circle in mobile games is not fixed but must be actively created and maintained by players, with the boundary between virtual and physical play shifting continually.

The authors further argue that players must continually balance three relations: to themselves through self-awareness, to objective conditions through instrumental action, and to other players through social interaction. Among these, physical social interaction, including facial expression, body language, and synchronized movement, proved the most effective driver of immersion and of sustaining the magic circle. The paper proposes design implications such as treating PDAs as tangible weapons or using on-map directional cues to shape players' sense of presence and power. Its approach is largely qualitative and descriptive, and it calls for further research into the instrumental relation and into how the three relations interact.