Abstract
As we look over the last decade, the obvious shifts that can be gleaned are the erosions of once distinct categories such as ‘hardcore’ versus ‘casual’ gamer. Instead, we have witnessed an inversion whereby mobile games, once categorized as ‘casual’, became ‘serious’ and now casual again. With the ubiquity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services along with the transformation of the mobile phone into the multi-mode mobile media, the capacity for mobile location-aware games to teach us new types of experience of place and sketch new cartographies for place has burgeoned. By traversing the online and offline simultaneously through haptic (touch) screens, the possibilities for mobile gaming to teach us new ways of experiencing place upon various levels — that is, not just as a physical geography but technologically, emotionally, psychologically — is endless. In this article I explore the various forms of urban mobile gaming, especially around the experiential and experimental types such as location-based mobile gaming. I focus upon a case study of the Korean mobile game group, Dotplay, in order to flesh out some of the ways in which place reflects, and is inflected by, mobile gaming.
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