Towards an integrated theory of mediation: Combining postphenomenology and media ecology to understand the experience of location-based games

Abstract

This article highlights the utility of combining postphenomenology and media ecology to understand how experience is mediated in the context of location-based games. While both conceptual approaches are concerned with mediation, their analytical toolkits have different and complementary emphases. Postphenomenology is particularly well suited to examining the nature of human–media relations, while media ecology encourages us to apprehend these human–media relations in the context of complex entanglements of relations. This holistic approach is essential to understand how practitioners of location-based games experience the world. Such experience is influenced by many factors, including other entities that participants encounter in the landscape, other participants, the rules and roles of the game and locative media infrastructures. In this article, I explore the processes by which one location-based game, geocaching, mediates experience of the landscape. To do so, I draw primarily on a case study from the fieldwork conducted with geocachers in Melbourne, Australia.