Play about Place: Placemaking in location-based game design

Playable cities and smart cities share the same infrastructure yet present different approaches to citizen participation. In this paper, the playable cities approach to digital infrastructure is contrasted with various iterations of the smart city to explore affordances for game design in the hybrid city. Placemaking is introduced in relation to play via a short history of playful urban interventions over the last century leading to an approach that uses strategies from a range of disciplines to explore game design that acknowledges cities as always being in the process of becoming and how games may allow citizens to shape the future, preserve the past, and recognise the present within the urban environments in which they live. Three examples are explored to demonstrate early work towards this approach: a resource management game based on real census data, an urban design app that uses augmented reality to situate citizens in the process, and location-based augmented reality game that explores the role of placemaking at macro and micro scales. These examples draw out and demonstrate the opportunities afforded by a playable cities approach that interacts with digital infrastructure, making it tangible and enabling social structures to emerge through play communities. Placemaker is explored in detail in relation to the site and city in which it is situated and how it relates to architecture, community, infrastructure and place. This game is built upon urban codemaking, an established framework for decoding urban environments and appropriating them for play. Three different stages of the year-long game are articulated in relation to the different scales of public space and perception that they have impact upon. The interaction techniques and design processes of the game are analysed in relation to digital infrastructure at the scale of the hybrid city. Finally, the examples lead to speculation on their potential use as to situate dialogue between citizens and digital infrastructure, particularly in relation to participatory urban planning. The games actively use and engage with urban planning and design concepts and language, inviting players to re-imagine their neighbourhood in these terms. As such, they demonstrate the potential for the future development of urban planning games involving citizens in participatory design processes.