Urban Games to Design the Augmented City

This 2012 Eludamos article argues that urban games can reshape how people experience cities and proposes that designers can draw on playful, behavioural methods of urban exploration to build augmented-city experiences. Its central thesis is that understanding how people move through urban space, and how they attend to it, can inform the design of games that integrate into the city fabric. The authors propose two macro-categories for game-augmented cities: the "city as pop-up game," a limited and fully perceivable space such as an urban chess board, and the "city as big playground," a larger environment requiring navigation tools, exemplified by the Urban Iditarod.

To ground these categories, the work draws on two exploratory models. Rhabdomancy, or dowsing, is traced historically from Georg Bauer's 1556 De re metallica through its repeated rejection by scientists such as Faraday and Mendeleev. Flânerie, the practice of attentive urban wandering, is treated alongside it. The authors map the rhabdomant's device-focused attention and the flâneur's wandering onto players' interaction with urban "signal fields," distinguishing natural from planned sources of urban signals and contrasting the two patterns in terms of body posture, tool use, and relationship to space.

The conclusions emphasize spatial dislocation, embodied play, and serendipitous exploration, including the experience of getting lost, as core design elements for integrating games into cities. The work contains no quantitative data; its findings are conceptual. Its theoretical foundations span roughly 1840 to 2011 and draw on psychogeography, pervasive and hybrid-reality game studies, and game design scholarship, situating the argument within urban exploration and pervasive game design.