Place as Media in Pervasive Games Hugh Davies ABC Multiplatform Producer ANAT Board member Northcote, Victoria 3070 ABSTRACT By blurring the boundary between game fiction and reality, Pervasive Games impact the shared space of the city areas that they use as gaming platform. Drawing on notions of spatial theory and Pervasive Gaming practice, this paper discusses ways in which game designers can navigate the constraints and possibilities of gaming in social and physical spaces towards creating greater immersion for players and generating new associations for city spaces. This design challenge within Pervasive Gaming represents a broader shift in interest from representing spatial reality in gaming, to being a part of shaping it. Categories and Subject Descriptors Cross media, Games General Terms Performance, Design, Human Factors, Spatial Interaction Keywords Pervasive Games, Game Design, Psychocartography 1. INTRODUCTION The term Pervasive Games encompasses a wide range of emerging and interrelated game types. These games are typically played in city areas and often utilise a range of digital media platforms such as mobile phones, websites and GPS tracking as well as analogue media such as posters, maps, notes and can involve physical activities including performance and treasure hunts. These games are often presented with or within other activities such as art installation, urban renewal, political activism and advertising. While there is currently little agreement on a definitive description of Pervasive Games, what distinguishes them as different to traditional game types is that they use the real world as a game play area and by doing so they blur the margins between game and reality. This expanding and blurring of the boundaries of game space creates an ambiguity between game world and non-game world that, in turn, alters the players’ perception of place - both during and potentially after the game. In this paper I will discuss how Pervasive Games impact the physical reality they use as gaming platform, and how game designers can navigate the constraints and possibilities that playing in social and physical reality entail. I will begin by briefly discussing the concept of the magic circle and the way Pervasive Games challenge this notion. Drawing on the work of prominent researchers in the field, I will then outline the key concepts and characteristics of Pervasive Games, with particular focus on the uncertainty they create between game and everyday worlds and the resulting implications for designers, players and the general public. Referencing the concept of psychogeography and discussing its relationship to Pervasive Games, I will attempt to show how players can both receive information from and form relationships with spaces. Finally, with reference to researchers in the field of game spaces and urban design respectively and with examples of games including my own, I will discuss the ways in which notions of space and place can be utilized to create player immersion in Pervasive Games. My objective is to show how the use of places as media in Pervasive Games can, if executed successfully, impact our relationship to place as we actively participate in creating a shared reality. But first, I will turn to the notion of the magic circle, a theoretical concept used to define the boundaries of game environments. 2. GAME WORLD Playing a game means acting according to a specific series of rules, objectives and codes of conduct, different to the ones we normally navigate within in our everyday lives. Playing a game therefore requires stepping into a different world, or rather; a magic circle. The notion of the magic circle [18] presents games as closed systems: when players join a game they simultaneously enter a sort of contract with this game, agreeing to understand and accept the game world, its rules and its boundaries. As Hector Rodriguez [17] points out, these boundaries are frequently both physical, consisting in a literal precinct such as a chessboard, ring, field, stadium, stage, etc, and temporal involving a clear beginning and end, which mark the game off as a temporary interruption of ordinary life. By expanding the play area away from the board game, computer or lounge room or arena and into public arena such as cities, parks and indeed the world, Pervasive Games challenge and blur the magic circle - the boundary between the game world and the non- game world. Alternate Reality and Immersive Games, considered by some academics and designers to be forms or genres of Pervasive Games, even employ a TINAG (This Is Not A Game) rhetoric [13], by which they deny their very existence as games. It is this very ambiguity of game to reality that makes these games so compelling and immersive. However, while these types of games open up new challenges and possibilities for game designers to exploit, they also raise issues concerning the confusion of reality in public areas. 2.1 Gaming in Reality “The opportunities of spatial expansion are immense. It allows social playing in many locations simultaneously, taking games to places where they are not usually supposed to be”, argues Gamelab and IPERG researcher Markus Montola. [14] Many of these games challenge the use of the spaces that they occupy by their very presence in them. Through their disruption of public space many Pervasive Games seek to critique and to disrupt social