Unintended Consequence: Pervasive Games and Public Art

Games such as Niantic’s Ingress and Pokémon GO have demonstrated that Pervasive Games can be highly engaging for their audience by creatively combining location-based data and augmented content. This research asks how Pervasive Games using Augmented Reality can contribute to a changing perception of public art through a playful exploration of place. By unintentionally discovering art whilst playing games, new meanings are seen to emerge and are explored from new perspectives through the surprise of discovery and re-negotiation with art in public places. This chapter is a semiotic exploration, through analysis and interview of some of the signs and symbols of public art and particularly the ontological shifts arising from the re-contextualization and revisitations of symbols in augmented frameworks. The analysis of semiotic change seeks to explore the shifting interpretations of public art afforded by playing games with augmented technologies. Pervasive Games such as Wayfinder Live, Pokémon GO, and its precursors unravel an evolving set of rich discourses in which to investigate the recursive correlations of Art and Place. The outcomes of this analysis of Pervasive Games reveal the ontological implications not of intentional design, but of the unintended consequence of playing games through art.