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Emergent Uses of a Multiplayer Location‐aware Mobile Game: the Interactional Consequences of Mediated Encounters

2006; Routledge; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17450100500489221

1745-011X

Christian Licoppe, Yoriko Inada,

Impact of Technology on Adolescents

Abstract This case study of the behaviours of players in an advanced location‐aware gaming environment provides a first glimpse of what the experience of living in a mobile‐based augmented urban public space might be like, and of the kind of social order and emergent 'form‐of‐life' that might characterize it. We have focused our analyses on three key features. First, game‐related mobility: how users adjust their movements to the 'augmented' ecologies that they encounter (augmented with localized informational objects relevant to the ongoing game activity). Second, 'Onscreen encounters', which occur when players notice one another's position on their mobile screen. The management of such interactions, where players are open to interaction because their location is a public matter, is a key feature of the construction of the social order in such a location‐aware environment. Third, the management of situations of actual or potential misalignment between 'ordinary' and screen‐mediated perceptions. The very possibility of such misalignment is also a peculiarity of location‐aware technologies. These technologies entail collaborative work by the actors to appropriately tame the power relationships that might emerge from such perceptual asymmetries. Keywords: Mobilityubiquitylocation‐aware systemsmobile multiplayer gamescreen encountersinteractionpublic spaceinstant messaging corpus Notes The geographical and personal names mentioned in the text are modified. 1. Because terminals are sensitive to the profiles projected some ten metres away by means of the Bluetooth technology (Lejealle and Licoppe, in progress). 2. To act on them in the screen space, the equipped user has to be physically close to their 'location'. 3. The rapidity of these connections with the game server is critical as regards the acceptability of the game. At certain times the connection time ranged from 30 seconds to one minute, which was experienced as a real problem by players. 4. Experience of the game is richer with a GPS terminal (the precision of geo‐localization is then a matter of a few metres) but the game also offers the possibility of localization from cells. Experienced players have become accustomed to constantly switching from one to the other in their quest for objects since the map in cell mode is slightly different to the GPS map, due to the position of the antennae. It is therefore likely to reveal new objects in one or two clicks, without the player moving at all. 5. This possibility of creating teams and getting together, introduced shortly before my study, has been highly successful. 6. For cultural and religious reasons, it seems that people with handicaps find it very difficult to be socially integrated in Japan. 7. This distinction seems to stem from Simmel who distinguished displacement (Bewegung) and actors' potential mobility (Beweglichkeit). 8. In a study under way (Diminescu, Licoppe, Smoreda and Ziemlicki, 2005) we identify artefacts that people wear or carry around. The lists look something like this: apartment keys, access badge to work premises, access badge to office, access badge to canteen, video club card, etc., new motorbike keys (ignition and security), video club card, parking access card, magnetic device for access to apartment block, health insurance card, credit card, Navigo card, diary, ID card, social security card, complementary health insurance card, three car licences, driver's licence, voter's card, car insurance certificate, cell phone. 9. With the exception of one of them who was a taxi driver and had his own vehicle. 10. She uses her first name to talk about herself, rather than the pronoun I, which makes her sentences sound childish. 11. Emoticon that means 'conniving smile'. 12. He ends his message with a w, the abbreviation for warai (laugh). 13. In the sense defined by the CSCW tradition (Schmidt, Citation2002). 14. Players can make contact for the first time when searching for rare objects to barter. This bartering is based on prices that depend on the rareness of the objects but that emerge mainly from the players' multiple interactions. The encounter is then based on inventories and profiles, and is independent of the players' proximity. 15. Here, the fact of apprehending him or her as close by and as a player with certain qualities that the interface functionalities make accessible, like the player's level and the objects that he or she is looking for or making available to exchange. 16. In this case only the player on PC 'sees' the other player's position. The latter, who has only a mobile terminal, has no access to large‐scale maps on which he or she could 'see' the PC player. 17. In the above textual interaction the two protagonists adopt the positions of master and pupil, respectively, and use formal expressions that suit those roles. 18. 'I'm always on the same side of my body; it is offered to me from an invariable perspective. But this constant evasion, this inability to superimpose one on the other precisely, the feel of things with my right hand and the feel with my left hand or else, in the exploratory displacements of the hand, the tactile experience of a point and that of the "same" point in the next moment – or the auditory experience of my voice and that of other voices –, is not a failure. For if these experiences never overlap entirely, if they slip away just as they are about to coincide, if there is always "leeway" in them, a gap, it is precisely because my two hands are part of the same body. Because it moves in the world, because I stretch out from inside and from outside, I experience, as many times as I want to, the transition and metamorphosis from one experience to the next, and it is only as if the hinge between the two, solid, unshakeable, remained irremediably hidden from me. But this gap between my left hand touched and my right hand touching … is not an ontological void, a non‐being; it is bridged by the total being of my body and by that of the world; it is the zero pressure between two solids that causes them to adhere to each other' (Merleau‐Ponty, Citation1964, p.192) [our translation from the French]. 19. The interaction took place in Tochigi, some 50 km from Tokyo. Since the area is still fairly rural (onscreen encounters between players are certainly less frequent than in the centre of Tokyo), their mode of transport is by train rather than tube. 20. M's complete nickname corresponds to a particular appearance and identity, that of young women who are 'ganguro', i.e. tanned with dyed blond hair, dressed in the latest fashion, and who stride around the Shinjuku and Shibuya districts in small groups. 21. The first sentence should theoretically have been 'sô(so) mitai(seems) dane(to be)' but M allowed herself to delete everything and only retain the last word, which made a highly familiar and relaxed sentence. As regards the second sentence, 'Sagashi chao' means 'I'm coming to fetch you!'. The speaker adds the suffix 'kana' so that the sentence becomes less declarative and more suggestive, thus inviting the interlocutor to agree or give an opinion. 22. She is implying that she is in a compartment in which the seats are aligned. 23. 'Goyukkuri' is a term that can be used when one is leaving an interlocutor or when the interlocutor is moving away, with the connotation of 'enjoy your stay'. N uses this term to indicate to M that he is moving away from her. 24. When M learns that K did not alight at Koga he says that she made a mistake. We can assume that they were probably in the same train but that M mistook another mobile user for K who, like her, alighted at Koga. 'Itterrasshai' is another term commonly addressed to someone who is leaving. These terms are exchanged when one person is leaving and the other one staying behind (whether for a short or long period of time). M greets K with this term since he is carrying on with his trip whereas she is still in the station. 25. In his sociology of emotions, James Katz suggests that emotion arises when actors are questioned in such a way that they are wrenched from the sensorial frame of their action by the sudden salience of a new sensorial frame. He takes the example of drivers who become annoyed when someone cuts in in front of them, and feel challenged as individuals and citizens, and detached from their familiar and symbiotic engagement with their car (Katz, Citation1999). Y is caught between several sensorial and interactional frames, depending on the state of asymmetry or perceptual reciprocity produced by the interaction.