Playing Apart with Mission Realms: Exploring Shared Leisure Across Distance Through Location-Based Play

Sharing in outdoor leisure is widely recognized for its role in fostering social connection and engagement with place. Yet many forms of outdoor leisure are difficult to share when companions are physically apart. In this paper, we investigate how Location-Based Games (LBGs) can be designed to support shared outdoor play over distance through asymmetric collaboration between a remote player and an outdoor player. We present Mission Realms, a narrative-driven LBG that pairs one outdoor player physically navigating a campus environment with one remote player collaborating through a live video connection, story fragments, environmental clues, and location-based missions. Across two study phases (N = 21), including both researcher-paired and dyadic play, we examine how the game, mission structure, role distribution, player agency, and narrative framing shaped experiences of social and place-based connection over distance. Our findings show that remote–outdoor play was most socially connective when missions made collaboration necessary rather than optional, fostering player agency, interdependent puzzle-solving, and shared responsibility for progress. Connection to place emerged when play anchored attention to meaningful environmental artifacts, integrated the outdoor setting within the story of the game, and supported shared interpretation through exploration of the physical environment. We offer design insights for lightweight remote–outdoor LBGs, showing how asymmetric roles, player agency, environmental anchoring, and everyday technologies can be combined to support playful, socially connective shared outdoor experiences across distance.