Mobile Interface Theory by Jason Farman

Author:Jason Farman [Farman, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138625020
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Geocaching and Hybrid Space

To fully explore immersive locative games and the traversal of game space and everyday space, I choose here to elaborate on the sensory-inscribed engagement with these elements in the game geocaching. Geocaching, which is essentially a high-tech treasure hunt using a GPS receiver (GPSr), began shortly after May 1, 2000, when the United States government removed the restriction to civilian access to the highly accurate signals from GPS satellites. Soon after the “Selective Availability” was removed, people began testing the accuracy of their GPSrs, including Dave Ulmer, who placed a container in the Portland, Oregon area and logged its coordinates onto a Usenet site. The container was found by users of the site, who logged their visits both in the container’s logbook and online. Thus began the GPS treasure hunt game called “geocaching.” This locative game serves as a strong example of the sensory-inscribed body in pervasive gaming space: from the correspondence between the GPSr and the material landscape to the confirmation of “presence” at the site of the cache gained through a physical signature in the logbook coupled with an online retelling of the find, geocaching blends two distinct genres of locative gaming. It utilizes both augmented landscape gaming (in which data overlays the city) and trace-based gaming (in which the trails or tracks created by the user’s movement are utilized as part of the objectives of the game). Movement across the augmented landscape—and the proprioception of the self in relationship to that augmented landscape and technology that creates the mixed reality space—is how gamers are able to successfully locate geocaches and log their visits. This proprioception also convenes with the cultural inscriptions users must engage to hide in plain sight through performing a sense of alternate purposes. Users embody false purposes in order to keep their agenda hidden from passersby, thus keeping the cache container hidden from non-gamers. Geocaching serves as a key example of the sensory-inscribed body in locative gaming, since users who enter the augmented landscape of GPS data also enter a realm that requires a different mode of embodiment, one that depends on a sensory-inscribed convening of bodies, technology, and material space. In this hybrid space, embodiment is reliant on the correspondence of all these elements and is utterly dependent on the acknowledgment of presence by technology and the social structures that establish and maintain the space.

Geocaching has grown in popularity as a locative game since its inception in 2000. As of early 2011, there are over four million registered players, growing at a rate of 2,500 a day during 2009–2010. There are currently over 1.2 million geocaches hidden around the world (including Antarctica) and some regions are so densely populated with caches that players can find one every 0.1 mile (the minimum distance caches can be placed apart from one another). Players can either upload a cache’s information (including GPS coordinates, hints, and container type) to their GPSr or simply load the details of nearby caches on their mobile phone through the geocaching application.

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