ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? This chapter looks at key instances where location-based mobile games have been used to make connections with complete strangers. The focus, in the first half of the chapter, is on how these issues have been developed in the locative gaming projects of the UK media art collective Blast Theory (particularly focused on Uncle Roy All Around You and Rider Spoke). The narrative elements of these locative games encourage or force players to interact with strangers. In so doing, players practice the community space of the city in a unique way: they reimagine the city as a space that-instead of alienating and isolating-encourages interpersonal connections with “the Other” (or those who are extremely different from us). These locative games thus also reveal that space-based game narratives can reimagine ideas of community as that which is, in part, the ongoing interactionsthrough communication-with those who are different than the player while also allowing the player to occupy the place of the Other.
