I feel that the whole discussion of pervasive gaming is getting a bit confused. The original question, as I understood it, was whether it’s appropriate to require that PG have some kind of ‘impact’ on our ways of experiencing (and moving through) the city. Before rushing to answer that question, however, I feel that we should have clarified what we mean by ‘impact’: I feel that lots of the misunderstandings that have marred the discussion are a consequence our different ways of answering the latter question.
Sugey begins her post by suggesting that the “value and authenticity” of PG does not (and should not) depend on whether or not PG has a “long lasting impact” and concludes by suggesting that it would be enough if the only effect of PG was to “change one’s experience in the city”.
I agree that we should be content if PG could change one’s experience of the city (allow me for brevity’s sake to make the shift from “experience IN the city” to “experience OF the city” without argument – even though I’m aware that the shift may in fact misrepresent Sugey’s original position). An effect of this kind, however, is precisely what I would call an “impact”. In this, I guess, my standards are lower than Chris’s, as he seems to expect a more substantial kind of outcome (in his first posting he states that “a pervasive game should focus on getting people to work together in either a real or virtual space for the benefit of some kind of valuable learning experience” and in the second one he contends that, in order to be meaningful, an experiential change should “amount to some good”).
Melissa, I believe, is trying to be even less demanding than Sugey, since she questions even the claim that PG needs to change one’s experience of the city. She suggests that we should not judge PG (and locative media at large) by standards more demanding than the ones we would apply to other art forms. A painting in a gallery, she contends, “does not actively do anything or create an outcome or change our way of living in a significant manner” but it “provokes the viewer to think critically about something, or at least notice it.” Similarly, when it comes to PG and locative media, rather than expecting them to change the way we inhabit our cities, we should be content if they made us “think critically or differently” about our cities.
Again, like in Sugey’s case, I have to say that I agree with the conclusion, but that (according to my understanding of the terms) the argument is flawed: how can one say that art doesn’t actively do anything, doesn’t create an outcome, and yet that it provokes critical thinking? To imply (like Melissa’s argument does) that provoking the viewer to think critically does not amount to actively doing something betrays an impossibly demanding notion of what constitutes “doing” in art, and of what can legitimately count as an “outcome”. This notion, I think, is made explicit when she attributes to Chris and myself the claim that locative media should have a “measurable outcome”. I don’t think I ever brought “measurable” in the discussion; that sounds like a corporate conception of art, and I hope neither Chris nor myself have suggested anything like that.
To summarize my position, if PG was really able to make us think critically about the city (in a topographic, architectural, social, political or historical sense or, even better, in a way that brings together all or al least some of these dimensions) I would be all for it. So the main question will be: Do the examples we looked at do that? Do they make us think critically about the spaces we inhabit? In the case of Uncle Roy I’m a bit skeptical, but I’ll try to write about that next time.
