Guest Editors’ Foreword
Games, Play, and the Urban•
Sybille Lammes and Dale Leorke

In April 2019, the Game Research Lab at Tampere University, Finland, held

its annual spring seminar with a theme of urban play. Much of the lab’s discussion in planning the seminar concerned the very broad, difficult to define natureof these two words. Both “urban” and “play” come with a lot of baggage—conceptually, historically, and politically—so bringing them together as a seminar
theme presented challenges. This seminar was the Game Research Lab’s first toengage explicitly with the field of urban studies—a reflection of the proliferationof ludic interfaces in the contemporary urban environment and the resurgenceof interest in mobile and location-based gaming in the wake of Pokémon GO’s
global success. It also reflected the long-standing interest in the intersection ofplay, public space, and social interaction through scholars like Hannah Arendt,Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, and Georg Simmel and artistic and political movements like the Gutai group, New Games, Fluxus, and the Situationist
International.
This special issue of the American Journal of Play builds on the seminar
but broadens its theme to encompass games, play, and the urban. This theme
both reflects the wide range of papers from the seminar, not all of which werespecifically about urban play, and explores the complicated, contradictory, andsometimes messy intersection of the three concepts—games, play, and urbanism.
The authors in this special issue come from such fields as urban studies, interface studies, architecture, and the design disciplines. Especially, theemphasis on play, instead of games, allowed a variety of approaches. Althoughdefinitions are always problematic, as a rule of thumb, we consider the concept ofgame to emphasize a rule-bound approach to play. This definition often tends todescribe and include artifacts (game boards, video games) specifically intended
to use for acting within these rules. When we use play as a term, we include
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Contact Sybille Lammes at s.lammes@hum.leidenuniv.nl

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more activities, and our emphasis shifts to cultural practices that are versatile,ambiguous, and quixotical (Sicart 2018; Sutton-Smith 2001). This allows us togo beyond the strict divide between digital and nondigital prevalent in the fieldof game studies. Play can be part of many activities that gives one pleasure,including but not limited to games.
This broadness proves particularly important if we want to shed light on
the complex relation between the urban and play. After all, the unevenness andlayered character of (public) urban spaces allows a great many different ludic
practices, from running, touring, Pokémon hunting, parkour, hide-and-seek,
and playground activities to more stationary activities such as street chess ortabletop games in cafes. Hence, we need a more processual and contextual
approach. In this special issue, we address precisely this complexity and versatility. We work from an understanding of the urban as consisting of intense
networks in built environments that can give rise to different manifestationsof play and include in them different artifacts, senses, and actors (human andnonhuman).
Lefebvre (1991) famously wrote that spaces are not a pregiven but arealways an outcome of social processes. The same goes for play in urban environments, which come into being through players engaging with streets, buildings, parks, bridges, and walls. Ludic spaces are constantly produced throughthis engagement. As soon as these actions stop, urban play disappears andis unproduced. Yet Lefebvre was also critical of making a clear distinction
between the urban and the rural in the late twentieth century. He observedthat during urbanization, since the industrial revolution the difference between
the rural and the urban, or the city and its hinterland, has gradually faded.
Nowadays it has become untenable to speak of them as separate spaces orspheres (Brenner and Schmid 2015). In our times, this erosion of the difference between the urban and the nonurban has become even more palpable(Biagi 2020).
The articles in this issue specifically address such challenges in the context
of the experience of play in contemporary urbanized cultures—from the gameNight in the Woods, where a return to postindustrial suburbia is linked to social
inequality and well-being, to the experience of the urban as a curated spacethrough playful artistic interventions to playful mapping as an urban (or evenposturban) experience. But the boundaries of the urban also become complicated in the Japanese mobile experience of nondigital collecting as a prehistoryof Pokémon GO and in some pervasive games played in public places. SuchGuest Editors’ Foreword

examples produce hybrid spaces (de Souza e Silva 2006) in which urban landmarks like monuments or bus stops can acquire a certain ambiguity. Together
the articles show how play can unfold in our urbanized environments and how
play uses the affordances of the city as a playground, the shape of which canshift according to context, time, and engagement.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to worsen as we write, hasonly further highlighted the vital importance of play, face-to-face social interaction, diversity, and equality for urban public life by constraining the freedom
to move and act of so many (de Luca 2020; Du, King, and Chanchani 2020;
Ducharme 2020). Playtime and play spaces have become extremely limited
as gyms, sportsgrounds, and playgrounds close and an overall restriction getsimposed on what we can do and where we can go, especially in dense urban
environments where space is scarce (Hjorth and Lammes 2020). Yet, curiously,
people have not stopped playing but have found play elsewhere and in different things, sharing their experiences through social media and game platforms
and making their homes and backyards into playgrounds (Alden 2020; Khan2020; Raza 2020).
Debates around urbanism might at first seem disconnected from research
about games and play. But we frame this special issue in conversation withthem precisely to complicate and challenge fixed assumptions about the relation
between games, play, and the urban. Any discussion of this intersection inherently involves how we define and analyze urban space. Too often scholarshipin game studies and related disciplines still uses the city as a static, generic, andunproblematic category. Cities and urban space are construed as abstract canvases over which digital interfaces can be superimposed or with which they canbe seamlessly merged. If we perpetuate these assumptions, we risk overlooking
the materiality of cities as assemblages of objects, infrastructure, and humanand nonhuman organisms. We also risk ignoring the urban as a construct, often
biased by European and American perspectives and informed by colonialist
assumptions about modernity and progress. And lastly, we risk falling into easy
distinctions between urban and nonurban, separating the rural, urban, and natural even as these distinctions visibly collapse around us. Engaging with scholarship about urbanism opens up a range of new perspectives that can expand theterrain of games and play scholarship and challenge us to think more deeply
about the terms we use. To this end, we hope the articles in this special issue
pave the way for future research that responds to the nuances and ambiguity ofboth play and the urban.

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References
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