Indigenous Cartographies: Pervasive Games and Place-Based Storytelling

Abstract

With the rise of pervasive games in the last two decades, peaking with 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, cross-cultural, ancient, and persistent notions of place? How can locative and pervasive experiences respond to local and Indigenous understandings of place? 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 article reviews the current literature on Indigenous pervasive games and discusses an augmented reality audio-game that features Australian First Nations’ stories of land, river, and sky. Players of the game are transformed into wayfarers as they move across the landscape to uncover alternate and pre-settlement cartographies bringing new insights to familiar territory.