Urban Games: Inhabiting Real and Virtual Cities

Virtual environments, originally seen as less-than-perfect replicas of physical world, acquire their own identity with unique visual and spatial logic. Identity that now starts permeating back into everyday life and informing what is expected or acceptable within physical reality. The distinction between the actual and virtual fades when seen through the screen of a smartphone, experienced through a navigational system of the video game console, or manifested by media rich culture often confusing a product with an image. The paper considers massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) as the analogy to an urban ritual/happening and places AR in the broader context of the mobility-on-demand culture, location-based and ubiquitous technologies, and the authoring of the public realm. It also explores how we can take an advantage of the urban mobility for crowd sourcing, social networking, and multi-player gaming as well as non-normative use of public spaces