Location-Based Mobile Games and Sense of Place: An Ethnographic Study on Ingress

Abstract

Locative media, which consists of network, mobile devices, locational data and urban spaces, is an interdisciplinary research topic at the intersection of communication, urban sociology and ecological psychology. It merges digital information into physical places and functions as an interface between user and the urban space. Location-based social networks and location-based mobile games change the ways of seeing the place and create hybrid place experiences. Hybrid places which consist of physical place and cyberspace occur in the last phase of spatial transformation. Location-based mobile games are being played on city streets and provide interaction with urban environments. This study is about the effects of location-based mobile games on sense of place. Drawing on an ethnographic study on a mobile game, Ingress, this paper explores the effects of location-based mobile games on the relationship between games and everyday life, production of sense of place, reproduction of images of places and presentation of place.