Playful Explorations of Indigenous Cartography

EasyChair Preprint no. 5031

Abstract

With the rise of pervasive games in the last two decades, peaking with 2016’s Pokémon Go, questions surrounding the perceptions, use and ownership of public space have rapidly emerged. Beyond commercial and public uses of city spaces, how are such experiences attentive to local, regional, ancient and persistent notions of place? How can, and are, local and Indigenous understandings of place incorporated into locative and pervasive experiences? Perhaps most decisively, what is the compatibility of ancient and Indigenous stories of sustainability set within rapidly obsolete frameworks of the latest mobile devices? In considering these questions, this paper discusses an augmented reality audio-game that features Australian First Nation stories of land, river and sky. Players of the games are transformed into wayfarers as they move across the landscape to uncover alternate and pre-settlement cartographies bringing new insights to familiar territory.

Keyphrases: Indigenous knowledge, location-based games, pervasive games

@Booklet{EasyChair:5031,
  author = {Hugh Davies and Olivia Guntarik and Troy Innocent},
  title = {Playful Explorations  of Indigenous Cartography},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 5031},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}