Locative Media & The City

Let’s finally turn to Uncle Roy. Something I find problematic (and, quite frankly, slightly annoying) is the emphasis that the authors of the survey (Steve Benford et al.) place on the game’s success in provoking “compelling experiences”. Success on the experiential level, however, even though possibly sufficient from the point of view of corporations interested in commercial applications of the game (and hence, possibly, from the point of view of Blast Theory themselves, quoted by Tuters and Varnelis to have claimed on their website that the group has “a history of working with corporate clients to deliver … commercial projects that draw global audiences to compelling, high adrenaline interactive experiences”) is scarcely enough when it comes to an evaluation of the critical import of the game within the context of locative media. Let me be clear: I have nothing against compelling experiences, and I certainly don’t think that high adrenaline per se is incompatible with critical thinking. However, the specific type of experiences that the game, according to the participants’ feedback, brings about is of a kind that doesn’t strike me as particularly significant in critical terms. Fine as a game, then, but not really worth of attention as a locative media work? Here’s what a player has to say:

“I had no idea where [the various places where I was required to go] were and unfortunately, the people I asked for directions got it wrong resulting in me heading in the wrong direction. This, however, didn’t detract from the experience.”

From a situationist perspective the quote is rather bizarre – of course wrong directions and mistaken routes didn’t detract from the experience: they WERE the experience! For this player, however, “the experience” seems to be less his (or her) actual navigation through the topographic and social space of the city, than a tightly constructed series of events pre-determined, to a large extent, by the rules and tasks of the game. I don’t see how “experience” thus conceived can have a meaningful impact on the participants’ critical re-examination of the city.

The city itself, as a matter of fact, is construed as nothing more than “a backdrop”: the first design strategy indicated by the authors in the final part of the paper is precisely

“to exploit the existing physical world – in this case the city, complete with its streets, buildings, history and not least its people – as the backdrop for the experience.”

I don’t know enough of PG in general to tell whether this is a specific characteristic of Uncle Roy or if it represents a feature of PG at large. That the latter may be the case, however, is suggested by Bo Kampmann Walther’ article on PG. Here the author states that

“ ‘Real life’ as such would not be interesting in a gaming sense. We need to organize and structure the non-teleological and open meaning of the mundane space in order to make it playable.”

This quote seems again to suggest that the space of PG is not the actual, open space of everyday life (open, that is, with respect to potential drifts and detours), but a structured space organized around (and possibly “narrowed” by) a series of game rules and tasks. I don’t want to press the point as a general comment on PG; in the case of Uncle Roy, however, I must say that, with these premises, it’s not surprising that the feedback interviews don’t record any kind of meaningful critical engagement of the players with the actual topographic and social space in which the game is immersed.

It may seem that the game offers several chances to engage with the city as a social construction. Lots of emphasis is put by the authors of the survey on the role of TRUST in the overall construction of the game, and on the many interactions (between players, and between players and random strangers) fostered by the game. The question, of course, is whether or not these interactions have a substantial critical import. I don’t think they do. Several participants have reported random verbal exchanges with strangers (“Asked a bunch of strangers if they were Uncle Roy”), but quite frankly, the value of interactions of this kind as an occasion for a critical questioning of urban social relations doesn’t sound much higher than that of a fraternity prank. As for trust (“the core artistic theme of the work”), I doubt that the game affords the chance to explore the issue in new and meaningful ways. Most games (and team games in particular) already rely on trust on various levels; even something as simple as a card game requires that players negotiate among themselves whether and to what extent they can trust each other. To make these negotiations explicit may be an interesting strategy, but the way in which this strategy is developed in Uncle Roy seems a bit too literal and unsophisticated to be effective: an actor in a polyester suit who asks you in a stage voice whether you would trust a stranger doesn’t strike me as the most effective agent of a critical re-thinking of social interactions within the urban context.