(De)coding the City: Analyzing Urban Play through Wayfinder Live

The authors use the location-based, augmented-reality game Wayfinder Live,
which one of them designed, as a case study to analyze urban play. Acknowledging
the difficulty of defining urban play, they expand existing approaches
to the topic by drawing on current theories about interfaces, assemblages,
and coding in such fields as media and cultural studies, game and play studies,
and urban studies. They consider Wayfinder Live as an interface—a site
of both connection and translation—for urban play, one that encourages its
players to test a given city’s physical and social boundaries. They argue that
the game offers a fruitful, if always contingent and contextual, framework
for analyzing digitally mediated urban play.