Playable Cities

A few years ago as my immersive VR/XR production work started, I wrote a volumetric XR mystery where Jack London and the ghosts of the Oakland port and pier areas came to life and shared their stories to warn us about the coming changes ahead with rising seas and climate shifts. The Port Mystery or #SeaChange, is a escape-the-future game written but not yet played — an immersive location-based AR game designed to be triggered by groups of people through interactive play in public places.

Games like this can be played anywhere, by anyone, using any number of physical and digital devices in tandem with an intelligent city environment. I started experimenting with ARGs, wearables and sensors in city-based gameplay around Boston back in 2000 to stretch our capacity for play in public together — today new games in Playable Cities employ a wide variety of sensors and interactive strategies to connect people in any number of ways, from counting participants in a park to using sensors in infrastructure like Hello Lamppost, a new story-interactive initiative coming soon to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Until a few years ago, storytelling in the public commons happened primarily through static places. Stages, statues, museums and most physical story elements like public art are passive, stoic and not participatory or interactive. We are now seeing a massive rise in INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING in the public commons, not only through VR, AR and XR applications but also through mobile gameplay and IoT smart cities initiatives embedded into our transit, recreation and public…