Abstract
This chapter investigates how locative games produced by Niantic, Inc., a Google-owned corporation—Ingress (2012–) (updated into Ingress Prime in 2019), Pokémon GO (2016–), and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite (2019–2022)—can be explored as screen-based hypertextual archives/databases. This chapter reveals the narrative potential of these games as storytelling machines, examining how hypertext and transmedia practices contribute to the embellishment of the Niantic storyworlds. The ways in which the gaming and narrative elements of the Niantic universe can be reconciled are investigated. This chapter explores the various hypertext forms of the Niantic non-site-specific narratives, while shedding light on how the convergence of locative media and gameplay contributes to the creation of narrative.
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Notes
- 1.
Lev Manovich notes that “[a]n interactive narrative (which can be also called ‘hypernarrative’ in an analogy with hypertext) can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database” (200).
- 2.
The old version of the Ingress Investigate website can be partially retrieved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190312084003/http://investigate.ingress.com/.
- 3.
The new versions of the Ingress websites can be found in the following links: https://ingress.com/ and https://community.ingress.com/en/.
- 4.
The Taskforce Times website of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite can be partially retrieved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220206234043/https://www.taskforcetimes.news/.
- 5.
These Pokémon GO websites can be found in the following links: https://pokemongolive.com/en/ and https://pokemongohub.net/.
- 6.
This is because in locative gaming the player body “is in the game, and the game in the world, enacting a seamless continuity between the virtual and the physical, and conflating the vicarious link between body and avatar” (Richardson 213). Interestingly, Markus Montola et al. refer to this as a “flesh avatar” while describing ARGs: “a player’s body becomes a de facto game token, the flesh avatar of the player” (84).
- 7.
This is something that happens in computer games as well, where space “can be experienced both strategically and emotionally” (Ryan, “Conceptions” 114).
- 8.
In “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse,” Aarseth claims that “[c]learly, games … can also be used to tell stories, but this is probably an extreme end of a spectrum that runs between narration and free play, with rule-based games and quest games somewhere in between” (375).
- 9.
Souvik Mukherjee writes that according to the Ludologists, “storytelling in video games is prosthetic to the playing experience” (10).
- 10.
I am borrowing the term “playable story” from Ryan who uses it to describe the relationship between interactivity and narrativity, writing that in a playable story, “gameplay is meant to produce a story,” while “the player’s actions are subordinated to narrative meaning” (“From Narrative Games” 45).
- 11.
Marie-Laure Ryan writes: “[k]illers and achievers are primarily ludus players, socializers and explorers paidia players” (Avatars 199). Roger Caillois categorizes games “on a continuum between two opposite poles,” with “paidia” being a free form of play, and “ludus,” which characterizes a more structured, ruled-bound form of play (13). The three games analyzed here seem to be a combination of ludus and paidia.
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Delioglanis, V.N. (2023). Reconciling Locative Gameplay and Hypernarrative Practices in Niantic Games. In: Narrating Locative Media . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27473-2_9
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