Status: In preparation
Expected publication: Winter 2026/2027
Author: Dr Dale Leorke
Abstract
Few game genres have attracted such competing promises as locative games. Emerging in the early 2000s, following the public availability of pinpoint GPS and the spread of mobile phones, locative games sought to take play out of the home and into the streets. They have been alternately celebrated for reclaiming public space for play, and criticised for disconnecting players from the places they are played in. This entry unpacks these claims and traces the history of locative games, from their roots in avant-garde art, sound walks, alternate reality games and the wider ‘locative media’ movement, to their popularisation through smartphone apps and the global success of Pokémon GO. It examines the interplay between commercial and artistic forms of locative gaming over various technological shifts – GPS (2000), smartphone apps (2008), Pokémon GO (2016) and, most recently, Niantic’s repurposing of player data to train spatial AI and build ‘an operating system for the world’.
Keywords: locative games; location-based games; locative media; Pokémon GO; public space; spatial AI
Dale Leorke
is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, University of Stirling, Scotland. They have written extensively about place-based art and games, unpacking their history and the discourses around them and critically examining their impacts through a combination of design research and player ethnography. They have published five books, including Location-based Gaming: Play in Public Space (Palgrave, 2018).
For more, visit www.dleorke.net.