As we look over the last decade, the obvious shifts that can be gleaned are the erosions of once distinct categories such as ‘hardcore’ versus ‘casual’ gamer. Instead, we have witnessed an inversion whereby mobile games, once categorized as ‘casual’, became ‘serious’ and now casual again. With the ubiquity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services along with the transformation of the mobile phone into the multi-mode mobile media, the capacity for mobile location-aware games to teach us new types of experience of place and sketch new cartographies for place has burgeoned. By traversing the online and offline simultaneously through haptic (touch) screens, the possibilities for mobile gaming to teach us new ways of experiencing place upon various levels — that is, not just as a physical geography but technologically, emotionally, psychologically — is endless. In this article I explore the various forms of urban mobile gaming, especially around the experiential and experimental types such as location-based mobile gaming. I focus upon a case study of the Korean mobile game group, Dotplay, in order to flesh out some of the ways in which place reflects, and is inflected by, mobile gaming.
Abell J. ( 2009) South Korean ‘Prophet of Doom’ blogger acquitted . Wired URL (consulted 10 November 2009): http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/south-korean-pr/ .
2.
Arnold M. ( 2003) On the phenomenology of technology: The ‘Janus-faces’ of mobile phones. Information and Organization13(4): 231-256.
3.
Benjamin W. ( 1927) The Arcades Project (trans. H Eliand and K McLaughlin) . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4.
Blast Theory (2005) Can You See Me Now? URL (consulted 8 November 2005): http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html.
5.
Bourriaud N. ( 2002) Relational Aesthetics (trans. S Pleasance and F Woods) . Dijon: Les Presses du Réel .
6.
Bruns A. ( 2005) Some exploratory notes on produsers and produsage. Snurblog 3November. URL (consulted 10 December 2007): http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/329.
7.
Chesher C. ( 2004) Neither gaze nor glance, but glaze: Relating to console game screens. SCAN: Journal of Media Arts Culture 1(1). URL (consulted 10 February 2007): http://scan,net.au/scan/journal.
8.
Cho H-J. ( 2004) Youth, internet, and alternative public space. Paper presented at the Urban Imaginaries: An Asia-Pacific Research Symposium, Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
9.
Davis A. ( 2005) Mobilising Phone Art, RealTime. URL (consulted 20 August 2005), http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue66/7782 .
10.
De Souza e Silva A. ( 2004) Art by telephone: From static to mobile interfaces . Leonardo Electronic Almanac12(10). URL (consulted 4 January 2006): http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/TEXT/Vol_12/lea_v12_n10.txt .
11.
De Souza e Silva A. ( 2006) From cyber to hybrid: Mobile technologies as interfaces of hybrid spaces. Space & Culture9(3): 261-278.
12.
De Souza e Silva A., Delacruz G. ( 2006) Hybrid reality games reframed: Potential uses in educational contexts. Games and Culture1(3): 231-251.
13.
De Souza e Silva A., Hjorth L. ( 2009) Playful urban spaces: A historical approach to mobile games. Simulation and Gaming40(5): 602-625.
14.
De Souza e Silva A , Sutko D (eds) (2009) Digital cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces. New York: Peter Lang.
15.
Dotplay (2007) Material gathered from Understanding Mobile Hardware mobile technology workshop . April.
Flanagan M. ( 2009) Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
18.
Gordon E., de Souza e Silva A. ( 2011) Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World . Boston, MA: Blackwell-Wiley .
19.
Haddon L. ( 1999) The development of interactive games. In: Mackay H, O’Sullivan T (eds) The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation . London: SAGE, 305-27.
20.
Harvey D. ( 2001) Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography . New York: Routledge.
21.
Hjorth L. ( 2005) Locating mobility: Practices of co-presence and the persistence of the postal metaphor in SMS/MMS mobile phone customization inMelbourne. Fibreculture Journal 6. URL (consulted 10 December 2006): http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_hjorth.html .
22.
Hjorth L. ( 2008) Cybercute@korea: The role of cute customisation and gender performativity in a case study of South Korean virtual community, Cyworld minihompy. In: Kim Y (ed.) Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia. London: Routledge, 203-216.
23.
Hjorth L. ( 2009) Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile. London/New York: Routledge.
24.
Hjorth L. ( 2011) Games and Gaming: An Introduction to New Media . Oxford: Berg.
25.
Introna LD, Ilharco FM ( 2004) The ontological screening of contemporary life: A phenomenological analysis of screens. European Journal of Information Systems13(3): 221-234.
26.
Jungnickel K. ( 2004) Urban Tapestries: Sensing the city and other stories . URL (consulted 10 September 2009): http://proboscis.org.uk/publications/SNAPSHOTS_sensingthecity.pdf .
27.
Kim SD ( 2003) The shaping of new politics in the era of mobile and cyber communication. In: Nyiri K (ed.) Mobile Democracy. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 317-326.
28.
Kim H. ( 2010) Korea is leading in the e-world [News in Focus]: From personal to government systems, the nation is a model for other countries . Joong Ang Daily. URL (consulted 13 June 2011): http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2918498 .
29.
Lantz F. ( 2006) Big Games and the porous border between the real and the mediated. Receiver magazine16. URL (consulted 10 February 2007), http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/16/articles/index07.html.
30.
Licoppe C., Guillot R. ( 2006) ICTs and the engineering of encounters. A case study of the development of a mobile game based on the geolocation of terminal . In: Urry J, Sheller M (eds) Mobile Technologies of the City. London: Routledge, 152-176.
31.
Licoppe C., Inada Y. ( 2006) Emergent uses of a location aware multiplayer game: The interactional consequences of mediated encounters. Mobilities1(1): 39-61.
32.
Luke R. ( 2006) The phoneur: Mobile commerce and the digital pedagogies of the wireless web. In: Trifonas P (ed.) Communities of Difference: Culture, Language, Technology. London: Palgrave, 185-204.
33.
Massey D. ( 1993) Questions of locality. Geography78(2): 142-149.
34.
Mäyrä F. ( 2003) The city shaman dances with virtual wolves - researching pervasive mobile gaming. Receiver magazine12. URL (consulted 20 May 2005): www.receiver.vodafone.com.
35.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2006) OECD broadband statistics. URL (consulted 3 December 2006): http://www.oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband .
36.
Proboscis (2007) Public authoring in the wireless city. Urban Tapestries. URL (accessed 20 June 2008): http://urbantapestries.net/ .
37.
Rafael V. ( 2003) The mobile phone and the crowd: Messianic politics in the contemporary Philippines. Popular Culture15(3): 399-425.
38.
Rheingold H. ( 2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.
39.
Richardson I. ( 2007) Pocket technoscapes: The bodily incorporation of mobile media. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies . 21(2): 205-216.
40.
Soja E. ( 1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso.
41.
Sweeny R., Patton R. ( 2010) CitySneak: Play pedaogy, and surveillance. In: de Souza e Silva A, Sutko D (eds) Hybrid Reality Games. Berlin : Peter Lang, 204-215.
42.
Urban Vibe ( 2005) Nabi Media Centre. URL (consulted 28 May 2008): http://eng.nabi.or.kr/project/view.asp?prjlearn_idx=119 .
43.
West DM ( 2006) Global e-government. Providence, RI : Center for Public Policy, Brown University.
