locative media

Jason Farman’s 2014 edited collection The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies follows closely on the heels of his critically acclaimed Mobile Interface Theory (2011). This new book features twenty articles from a diverse range of voices working in the field of locative media theory and design, each bringing his or her own background to bear on the topic of mobile narratives. Many of the challenges, considerations, and theoretical perspectives addressed in this volume serve to complement what has thus far remained a gap in game studies: the growing popularity of mobile games. While there have been several articles and books on the rise of mobile, social, and other “casual” games, most notably Jesper Juul’s A Casual Revolution (2012), there has been very little written on narrative in mobile games. Farman’s collection doesn’t fall back on the emergence of locative media as a field in the early 2000s, but rather propels both design and scholarship forward by acknowledging what I would call a second generation of mobile narratives and games, linked with the convergence of GPS and high-speed wireless Internet in smartphones since the iPhone 3G. Continue Reading →