8. The Design and Play of Geogames as Place-Based Education

A key affordance of games and technologies that emphasize geolocativity is their ability to bring people to new places, and mobilize aspects of those places to facilitate playful and interactive experiences. At a basic level, we can think of a mobile application’s ability to locate where you are (via GPS, QR codes, Bluetooth beacons, image recognition, etc.) and use that information to direct you towards specific objects or locations within a place or encourage particular types of interactions. Not only where you are, but what you do in specific locations (e.g. take and share photos) can become part of a mediated experience that encourages you to act and interact differently in the world. Games that take into account a person’s physical location can be single or multiplayer: relying on players’ co-presence in a given place either synchronously or asynchronously, or designed to elicit interactions among users in different places, where each player contributes based on the unique features of their location. In essence, mobile technologies can provide new ways of knowing where you are: from highlighting your position in time and space to helping you identify and interpret your surroundings, to cultivating new sociocultural and identity based modes of awareness. Geogames can amplify these possibilities by providing the conditions (e.g., the context and inspiration) needed to encourage players to take action within a particular place. As a result, game authors can facilitate new ways of seeing the world, open new modes of access to the worlds that players already encounter, and create new worlds and narratives layered on top of existing reality.