Due to fact that I am presently underemployed such a dutiful blogger, I took some notes on the live stream of the "The City as Gameboard" panel at Living Game Worlds IV. That conference wrapped up at Georgia Tech yesterday and it was interesting to peek into the proceedings by way of Ian Bogost, Blair MacIntyre and Susan Bonds' panel. Bogost and MacIntyre discussed augmented urban space in the context of their personal research projects and, unfortunately, Bonds (of 42 Entertainment fame) was asked not to stream her presentation. Here are notes from the first two talks.

[Stephen Shore / U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973]

Ian Bogost talked about the defamiliarization of urban space through gaming: "There is an unmet opportunity to expand our interest in real world game boards beyond the city as a locus for pseudo-politicized, hipster neo-modernism or beyond situationist inspired, one-off conceptual art, or even beyond low participation media spectacle".

• Setting games in real world environments like cities thins the membrane between the situations represented in a game and those experienced
• Mobile devices (as agents of disruption and estrangement) are useful for subverting everyday experience
• Currently working on Jetset, a forthcoming iPhone game
• Cruel to be Kind - pervasive game of "benevolent assassination" co-designed with Jane McGonigal, based on challenging the social contract of urban space
• Interesting idea of Jane's: instead of alternative reality gaming, why not think about "alternation" as a process where gamespace intersects with the real world challenging the divide between fantasy and reality
• Good example of this paradigm from visual communication is anamorphosis (see Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors)
• A problem with alternation in the urban environment is that it only works on indigenous city dwellers (and fails at the edge of the city or in a semi-rural environment) - Stephen Shore's photography can provide some inspiration
• There are many other game boards we could choose to use as canvases - parking lot, supermarket, diner, street, etc.
• The holodeck is not the model we should be looking at, rather the portal in Portal - with recursion and feedback where gamespace loops back on itself

Blair MacIntyre has spent the better part of the last decade exploring the intersection of augmented reality with new media experience: "The Apple App Store is a new paradigm for experience distribution".

• Augmented reality has got very popular largely based off the promise of handheld/mobile devices
• MacIntyre is interested in literal intersection of physical and virtual worlds i.e. headset that allows individual to see virtual world avatars that are in the same space
• Head-mounted displays are the way of the future - they won't be clunky like in sci-fi, a better reference is some of the products being developed by Microvision (one of which is pictured above)
• Key reference in augmented reality (AR) games is Roku's Reward
• Can You See Me Now? is another great example - allows interesting physical/virtual collaboration across gamespace (in that case Nottingham)
• In terms of processing power - today's laptop is tomorrow's mobile device.
• What are we going to do when we can put graphics and information all around us?