Released in 2012 as an open-beta for Android devices, Ingress has now been downloaded 12 million times across both Android and Apple devices. The game tasks players with territorializing their material environment through interaction with the mobile-based application. Using their mobile devices, players are equipped with a map of “portals”—user-submitted locations in the real world—and gameplay consists of engaging, capturing, and connecting these portals in order to control territory. I argue that within this type of mobile-mediated urban gaming, play is shaped by the player’s localized knowledge—how players learn to live within and move through space—as well as a sociocultural knowledge—social and cultural notions of what constitutes play within urban spaces. By focusing on portals as in-game elements with out-of-game materiality, this paper explores how players’ individual knowledge of the urban environment informs larger cultural notions of what constitutes play.
- 1 view