Mobile Collocated Gaming: Collaborative Play and Meaning-Making on a University Campus

Mobile games, except those location-based, augmented reality ones such as Pokémon Go, are designed to be placeless, so that mobile device owners could play anytime anywhere. Does such design erase the sense of place in mobile gaming? To investigate the spatiality of mobile gaming, we conducted an ethnographic study of mobile gaming in a Chinese university. We found mobile gaming as a form of collocated interaction, where participants collectively created meanings around distinctive places on the campus including dormitory, classroom, and laboratory, and engaged in collaborative play. Their mobile collocated gaming was shaped by the local social, organizational, and cultural contexts of places. The spatiality of mobile collocated gaming entails both learning and appropriation of the norms and expectations of places and creation of new meanings to negotiate tensions between mobile gaming and places. We further discuss the spatiality of collocated mobile gaming and broader social and cultural conditions.