4_Glazkov Summary (Концепция игрового столкновения как направление социологической интерпретации геолокационных игр)

National Research UniversityHigher School of EconomicAs a manuscriptKonstantin GlazkovThe Conception of Gaming Encounter as a Resourcefor Sociological Interpretation of Location-Based Mobile GamesThesis Summary for the purpose of obtaining PhD in Sociology HSEAcademic Supervisor:PhD in PhilosophySvetlana BankovskayaMoscow, 2018Problem StatementVideogames go out to the city space. Once limited by the format of personalcomputers and consoles, now they move with users of mobile devices. At the sametime, many other types of urban space that had not previously served as a “place forgames” received a new game content.An unexpected discovery in July 2016 was the sharp worldwide popularity ofthe location-based mobile game Pokémon Go downloaded more than 100 milliontimes and the average daily use time of which exceeded 33 minutes, that is longerthan Facebook (22 minutes) and Twitter (17 minutes).

Experts express differentversions trying to find answers to the question why a particular game gained suchpopularity. Some experts note that the game allows you to "re-discover the city", tofind new places on the map, to give them additional meanings. Others point out thatthe easily recognizable history of Pokémon fits well with the format of navigationaljourneys, after which other adventures of famous characters will be transferred tothe city space. Still others talk about the ability of location-based mobile games tosmooth out the spatial and social problems of the city turning the routine practicesof mobility into exciting game operations that promise new contacts and prestige inthe gaming community.

Nevertheless, the question of the deep transformations ofpublic interaction in terms of using location-based services in urban space remainsopen. Have location-based mobile games managed to overcome the limits of thegame, overstep its rules and restrictions thereby becoming part of public interactionand proposing new basic mechanisms of behavior in public places of the city? Theproblem of the dissertation research is the lack of full and consistent conceptualapparatus for analyzing public interaction in the conditions of technically mediatedcommunication between individuals in location-based mobile games.Since the 1960s the theme of urban games was significantly advanced insituationist and architectural projects. Urban space in these projects was consideredas a space of spontaneous interaction, meetings, redefinition and search for newmeanings.

Situationists and architects had different hopes about the media as aresource for the realization of their ideas. Since the end of the 1990s technologies2and communication devices became widespread and accessible to ordinary userswhich caused the rise of interest in the gaming filling of urban space due to locationbased services, promotions and games. However, the installation to play the city, theorganization of spontaneous meetings, provoking a lively and diverse "pretend city"received in location-based mobile games a little far from the situationist plans. Theinitial desire to bring to the city an element of the unexpected came up againstspecific technological solutions which imposed specific restrictions on the processesand interactions of users.Already in our time almost all mobile applications on a regular smartphoneuse data about the location of the device: starting with maps, navigators, taxi servicesand ending with social networks, weather, camera, banking applications.

Locationbased mobile games are a special case of location-based services and are chosen asan object for consideration for the reason that, unlike in other location-based genres,players experience urban space, their location and location in relation to other usersand passersby. These aspects are an integral part of the gameplay without which thegameplay simply becomes technically impossible.Thus location-based mobile games create an important precedent allowing toconsider emerging collisions in public interaction which takes place between theparticipants, but not always in the conditions of direct visual contact.

I.e. theparticipants of the interaction act on the basis of the presence of other players andpassers-by experience, whom they may not directly see, but track their actions usingmobile devices. The analysis of the emerging public interaction raises questionsabout the degree of elaboration of the conceptual apparatus which was previouslylimited to considering situations of face to face interactions.Trying to understand the theoretical understanding of location-based mobilegames, we find that the literature pays a lot of attention to the problems ofgamification of everyday processes, the formation of gaming communities and theprivacy of user data, while the involvement of location-based mobile games in publicbehavior receives insufficient coverage. This is largely due to the fact that the workof Erving Goffman - one of the leading theorists in the field of public interaction 3often receive limited interpretation among digital anthropologists and geographersthat sometimes prevents the re-actualization of the problem of maintaining publicinteraction with the participation of technically mediated communication.Location-based mobile games provide an important technical element thatwas previously poorly expressed in other theoretical solutions for disclosingmechanisms for maintaining public interaction — location.

The use of data on thelocation of users provides the necessary conditions for considering the reassembledsituation of public face to face interaction that nevertheless requires clarifying theconceptual apparatus, adapting methodological techniques and empirically revealingthe specifics of public behavior with gadgets. By answering these questions, we endup with a chance to get closer to understanding the situationist projects of gamingintervention in the urban space.Degree of problem elaborationThe problem of games is widely disclosed in the social sciences.

The gamesare considered as a mechanism of socialization (G. H. Mead, J. Piaget), an essentialelement of culture (J. Huizinga, F. G. Jünger, R. Caillois), a mechanism forredefining the rules of functioning of urban space (Guy Debor, I. Chtcheglov,W. Benjamin, M. Caverly), a mechanism of transactional analysis (E. Bern), a formof public interaction (E. Goffman), the system of conventional rules of language(L. Wittgenstein). In all these approaches the concept of the game has differentmeanings and do not always receive unambiguous definitions, sometimes moremetaphorical. It is also worth mentioning the theory of games as the direction ofstrategy analysis (J.

von Neumann, O. Morgenstern, J. Nash, T. Schelling), in whichthe game acts as a modeling tool. By the beginning of the 2000s a critical mass ofresearchers is accumulating who identify video games as a full-fledged field ofresearch (game studies) and offer two directions for their comprehension: ludology(G. Frasca, I.

Bogost) and narratology (E. Aarseth, J. Juul).Emerged also in the 2000s location-based mobile games were consideredprimarily not as games, but as a specific genre of location-based services, mobile4and media technologies in general. Key researchers in the field of location-basedmobile games originated from the departments of media communications and dealtmainly with the transformation of social relations in the process of using pagers, cellphones, the Internet, etc. in the 1990s. At the moment there are three leading researchcenters in the field of location-based mobile games: The Digital Games ResearchCenter at North Carolina State University (NCSU) - A. de Souza e Silva, J. Frith,L.

Humphreys; Research & Innovation in the School of Media & Communication atthe Royal Melbourne University of Technology (RMIT University) - L. Hjorth,S. Pink, H. Horst, I. Richardson, R. Wilken; Institut Mines-Télécom in TelecomParisTech (ENST) - C. Licoppe, Y. Inada, I. Arminen, A. Spagnolli.Since the release of Pokémon Go in July 2016 location-based mobile gameshave received an additional influx of attention from researchers. The most vividexample of this is the hot-lined syllabus prepared by a consortium of authors andincorporated various sources for contextualizing the game (Massanari A., et al.Pokémon Go Syllabus).

However, from the point of view of theoreticalunderstanding, the output of Pokémon Go has little effect on the concepts of keyauthors, some of whom have been working in this field since the early 2000s. Thespecial issue of Mobile Media & Communication 5 (1) 2017 edited by Larissa Hjorthand Ingrid Richardson and entirely devoted to Pokémon Go incorporates replicas ofmany authors, who for the most part include the phenomenon of the game in theframework of their previous research. Adriana de Souza e Silva mentions threemajor directions for studying location-based mobile games (connection betweengame and everyday life, the emergence of gaming communities, the problem ofsurveillance and security) at the same time noting that Pokémon Go is significantlyinferior to Ingress the Game in terms of the possibility of establishing primarycontact between players.

Frans Mäyrä suggests that Pokémon Go promotes theculture of the public game and the gaming (ludic) society. Christian Licoppe, LeeHumphreys and Sebastian Deterding apply to Pokémon Go continued the line ofGoffmanian research focused on the transformation of public interactions of playersexperiencing the co-presence of others on the mobile phone screen. In turn, Miguel5Sicart explains the success of Pokémon Go by the fact that augmented realitymechanisms have already existed and actively used before its appearance. Accordingto Jordan Frith, even during the Foursquare times business repeatedly turned thesemechanisms into tools to increase the attractiveness of certain places due to virtualgeotags and gamification of player movements (playbour).In the Russian academic context location-based mobile games are mainlyplaced in the field of studying urban navigation, digitalization of urban space,community self-organization, methods of mobile and digital ethnography(O.

Zaporozhets, E. Lapina-Kratasyuk, A. Strelnikova, L. Presnyakova).Despite the wide range of topics presented in both foreign and domesticstudies of location-based mobile games, the aspect of the involvement of the user ofmobile applications in public interaction in the urban space does not receivesufficient elaboration. The present work is aimed at proposing a consistentconceptual apparatus for analyzing public interaction within location-based gamingin the framework of E. Goffman's interactional conception.

The works ofE. Goffman are widely accepted among both foreign (A. Rawls, D. Maynard,D. Shalin, N. Denzin, M. Jacobsen, R. Ling) and among domestic researchers(A. Kovalev,G. Batygin,E. Nikolaeva,E. Kravchenko,M. Sokolov,V. Vakhshtayn, M. Erofeeva). However, the theoretical legacy of E. Goffman isusually reduced to a dramaturgical approach and frame-analysis assigning secondaryimportance to the structuralist1 logic of considering public interaction using theconcepts of “encounter”, “gathering”, “situation”2 (see definitions in Appendix A).In turn, E. Goffman’s structuralist approach allows finding the most basicmechanisms for the emergence of social relations between users accompanying theTalking about Goffman’s structuralist approach, we mean his distinctive desire to distinguishuniversal elements of interaction, fixing oppositions, a passion for classifications and typologies,for which G. Gonos is inclined to consider Goffmanian sociology as a specific American versionof structuralism.2A more common version of structural elements of interaction triad is “gathering - situation occasion”.