Who Owns the Gamespace? Negotiating Spatial Agency in Video Games

This paper examines spatial agency in video games, defining it as the degree of ownership a player can assert over the gamespace once a game becomes publicly available. Its central question is whether players who alter the map of location-based games are modding, vandalizing, or cheating. The analysis focuses on Pokémon GO and its 2017 switch from Google Maps to the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, and it situates these questions within broader debates about agency, cheating, and the commercial control of digital space.

The paper's key case shows players in Reddit communities editing OpenStreetMap with false inputs, such as relabeling residential backyards as parks or lakes, to attract rare in-game items. This produced friction between players, cartographers, and Niantic, which penalizes such conduct as cheating, and cartographers, who treat it as vandalism. A second case concerns Hong Kong protesters in 2019 who used custom Pokéstop names to signal their locations and convene gatherings, temporarily overriding Niantic's rules for how and where the game is played. Both cases are used to illustrate how control over location-based gamespaces is contested.

The argument holds that once a location-based game is published into public space, the gamespace becomes shared, co-constituted by code and by players' physical performance. On this view, player interventions are a transgressive tactic of modding and détournement rather than cheating or vandalism, and the paper frames them as resistance to the monopolistic, surveillance-driven model of Niantic and OpenStreetMap's corporate editors. The analysis draws on game studies, cartography, and critical theory, and is primarily conceptual and qualitative, relying on documented community activity rather than systematic survey or quantitative data.