Time travel as wayfinding: assembling past and present in location-based games

Location-based games are games that incorporate the player’s physical location and/or actions into the play activity through media interfaces. In this article, I chart how relationships with the past can emerge through location-based games due to the ways their designers and players engage with place. Drawing on two location-based games I developed and tested as part of a practice-based research project, which both focus on historical events, I frame the concept of time travel as a process of wayfinding: a propositional and intersubjective form of embodied navigation through which people assemble impressions of a place (and its past). I show how designers and players of location-based games negotiate the contingency and multiplicity inherent in live, physical, everyday contexts of location-based gameplay to produce diverse, complex and insecure impressions of historical scenarios. Ultimately, I suggest that the significance of location-based games as media for connecting with the past is in the relationships between navigation and narrative that are performed by designers and players. These relationships do not enable mimetic representations or experiences of the past; rather, they create compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating notions of what went before, what exists today, and how both are interconnected in place.