This is a response to this email from Markus:

Hi Markus,

I whole heartedly agree that the question is, “What is the purpose of classification?” My response is that, “we must classify in order to do more specific work.” It seems that everyone who works in our area has their own definition for ‘these games,’ and my primary concern is that the bulk of these definitions make good sound bites, but are thoroughly unusable when attempting to construct a greater theoretical framework. For example, a lot of definitions say that there is something intrinsically urban about these games and I disagree with that notion entirely.

Interestingly enough, I don’t see that IPerG’s approaches as being in any great conflict with my own- although I may be getting a head of myself. I believe that this genre of appropriative games are defined by the fact that they are designed for places/environments that were not originally intended to accommodate them. Now this definition can be approached through both schemas that you mentioned (issues of culture & distribution).

Culturally, these games are taking place in places where game generally aren’t supposed to be played. We see this in Norman Douglas’ London Street Games and when the NYPD requests that a checkpoint for Journey to the End of the Night relocates from the steps of a federal building. I realize the cultural implications reach much further than that, but they are not my immediate focus. Distribution is an interesting approach, but if you’ll bear with me I don’t think that it falls to far from my sub-genres (big game, pervasive game, ubiquitous game).

All games are at their core rule-based constructions. I really don’t anyone would argue with that. The distinction I have tried to base my sub-genre divisions on is who or what is administering, executing, and enforcing the rules of the game. The line that we like to draw at Georgia Tech is that an artifact (ludic or otherwise) is either computational or not. In my model, “the not” would be big games. I then divided the computational games into pervasive and ubiquitous games.

While this seems to be a simple question of tech, it is actual a question of cultural adoption of technology. Mobile technology is a great example to draw upon. In the US the cultural adoption of mobile tech lags far behind Northern Europe and Asia. As such when I design a “pervasive game” in the US that uses cellphones, I cannot rely upon anything beyond a voice connection and SMS. Without being an expert in Northern European mobile culture, I know for a fact that I could at-least MMS to that list for a game in your neck of the woods. In my view, pervasive technologies are naturally found in the area a game is to take place- which makes distribution a greatly simplified task. Ubiquitous technology, on the other hand, is tech that hasn’t been culturally adopted…which makes distribution/playability a far more daunting of a task. If we were to design a game using handhelds, GPS, and custom software, the chance of someone wandering along and being able to join in without being given equipment is zero.

I really don’t think anything (history or contemporary design) needs to be scrapped in order to move forward. I would love to see more encompassing models (as mine attempts to be), but people seem unwilling to generate them.

Best,
Dakota

P.S. For my own purposes I have defined an alternate reality game as an appropriative game that occupies two or more different types of environments concurrently (i.e. a real world location & a virtual world location).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under montola, appropriative games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.