(De)coding the City - Analyzing Urban Play through Wayfinder Live

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper

(De)coding the City presents Wayfinder Live as a location-based augmented-reality interface for analyzing digitally mediated urban play. The authors address the challenge of defining “urban play” and expand existing approaches through theories of interfaces, assemblages, and coding across media and cultural studies, game and play studies, and urban studies. Through design analysis and semistructured interviews from Tampere, Finland, the article shows how urban codes encourage players to test the city’s physical and social boundaries and decode overlapping cultural, geographic, material, social, and technical layers.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages35

Reading Time1 h 28 min

AccessFree to download

Analyzing Urban Play through Wayfinder Live

Wayfinder Live as an Interface for Decoding

Urban Codemaking: Encoding, Decoding, and Place

(De)coding the City Analyzing Urban Play through Wayfinder Live • Troy Innocent and Dale Leorke The authors use the location-based, augmented-reality game Wayfinder Live, which one of them designed, as a case study to analyze urban play. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining urban play, they expand existing approaches to the topic by drawing on current theories about interfaces, assemblages, and coding in such fields as media and cultural studies, game and play studies, and urban studies. They consider Wayfinder Live as an interface—a site of both connection and translation—for urban play, one that encourages its players to test a given city’s physical and social boundaries. They argue that the game offers a fruitful, if always contingent and contextual, framework for analyzing digitally mediated urban play. Key words: affect; assemblage; coding; decoding; encoding; interface; location-based gaming; urban play; Wayfinder Live. Wayfinder Live, launched in 2016, is a location-based, augmented-reality smartphone game designed by Troy Innocent. It incorporates the physical space of the city into the game through “urban codes” that are situated in the everyday urban environment. Players are encouraged to find and scan these codes with their smartphones to earn points and influence their faction’s control over the city. Wayfinder Live stands in contrast to many commercial location-based games—like Pokémon GO (Niantic, 2016), The Walking Dead: Our World (Next Games, 2018) and Minecraft Earth (Mojang, 2019)—that superimpose virtual objects onto an abstract map interface. Unlike these games, Wayfinder Live is deeply embedded in the material, social, and cultural conditions of the cities in which it is played. The urban codes that players scan are situated in, or near, hidden or less-frequented areas within the city, such as alleys and lanes. They are also designed to blend in with nearby urban infrastructure, architecture, street art and signs. The game’s designer used the mapping and documentation of unique characteristics of a given city to design the game through multiple iterations 270 American Journal of Play, volume 12, number 3 © The Strong Contact Troy Innocent at [troy.innocent@rmit.edu.au](troy.innocent@rmit.edu.au) in various cities. Players of the game, meanwhile, are asked to put away their phones momentarily and investigate their surroundings to discover the codes before interacting with them in an embodied way by scanning them with their phone’s camera. Through this process, Wayfinder Live acts as an interface for urban play that enlists players in a process of decoding the city across multiple layers—cultural, geographic, material, social, and technical. Our previous writing has examined how Wayfinder Live reconfigures the relationship of its players to the city in which the game is located through this embodied act of discovering and scanning codes (Innocent and Leorke 2019; Leorke 2018). Here, we build on both this research and an analysis—conducted through semistructured interviews—of the players’ experiences during its mostrecent iteration in Tampere, Finland. We explore more deeply how the features and characteristics of urban play are embedded into the game design and enacted through the player experience. Although urban play remains an elusive concept to define and analyze, we draw on Stevens’s (2007, 2012, 2017) approach to urban play as a mode of engagement with the city that often involves contesting the social and physical boundaries of urban space. This involves examining the two threads of creative-practice research that underpins Wayfinder Live. First, from a conceptual perspective, Wayfinder Live serves as a speculative world-building project exploring an urban culture based on principles of play. Second, from amore concrete design perspective, Wayfinder Live is an approach to public art that incorporates field research focused on the materiality of augmented reality. Both threads o

FAQs

What is Wayfinder Live and how does it relate to urban play?

Wayfinder Live is a location-based augmented-reality smartphone game that uses “urban codes” embedded in everyday city spaces. It frames urban play as a decoding process that lets players explore physical and social boundaries.

How do the authors define “urban codemaking”?

Urban codemaking is described as a methodology for situating players within ways of decoding messages already present in cities. It highlights layered codes across spatial, digital, cartographic, social, and ludic dimensions.

What research methods support the article’s analysis?

The article builds on prior work and includes an analysis based on semistructured interviews with players during Wayfinder Live’s most recent iteration in Tampere, Finland.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Dipper