Playful mobility and playable infrastructures in smart cities

Contemporary location-based games use complex data infrastructures that permeate city spaces. Embedded in urban environments is an ethos of play – a circumvention of surveillance-driven data assemblages and a desire to move freely with and in urban infrastructures. This chapter focuses on playful forms of mobility in urban environments and how infrastructures in urban environments become incorporated as playable objects in location-based games. Data and the infrastructures that make data accessible, such as maps, GPS and public Wi-Fi, impact how cities are structured and experienced. Accessible through mobile devices, these forms of infrastructures form part of a larger ecology of urban media. This chapter takes these issues and asks how games function as a form of urban media – with an emphasis on the idea of playable infrastructure and play mobility. The recent concept of the playable city – a design movement that highlights the civic potential of play in urban environments – provides a useful framework to think about how commercial forms of location-based gaming create or use playable infrastructures. In doing so, this chapter moves beyond the immediate game space of onscreen maps and towards thinking about how these maps draw from a broader range of technologies, infrastructures and urban mobility.