Locating Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism

This paper explores locative media projects involving play and games, and their potential to act as a tool for empowerment, community building, and cultural change. Locative media, as a genre of projects and as a set of tools and technologies, often offers playful scenarios or actual games with which to explore spaces, particularly the space of the city. What contemporary media artists attempt—to create novel experiences in the space of the urban environment—involves mapping, psychogeography, and the city using new technology for play. In many of these projects, the themes of mobility and play are touted as liberatory. The history of these types of creative projects which engage the city, and the insight they offer to recent work, will be highlighted in this paper in an attempt to flesh out the social and political possibilities of taking play to the streets.