G.R.O.U.P. Teams 2009-2010

Mobile City Chronicles

Led by James Holston (Anthropology) and Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice & Berkeley Center for New Media), the Mobile City Chronicles (MCC) research team will chronicle a contemporary city using mobile media. To chronicle the city, the research team will construct and playtest mobile "detection games" that engage new systems of monitoring urban life. These games will relate online data to local real-world experiences through locative media (cell phones, GPS, laptops).

The online data will come from new surveillance technologies that monitor behavior in cities. Examples include 911 calls, ER triage accounts, and pharmaceutical sales—all data that reflect changes in the distribution of health-seeking behavior. The research team will also use websites that track public safety, criminal activity, financial transactions, and dating activities. In their games, cell phones will be interfaces not only for reading from such databases but also for writing to them.

The chronicling of data, agency and space produces predictive social networks in the areas of crime, health, dating, real estate, and finance. In real terms, such chronicles become the basis, often under the rubric of security, of government intervention and policy. Thus, the research team will analyze and expose the new kinds of profiling on which, worldwide, states, corporations, and inhabitants increasingly rely to understand and exploit one another.

The goal of the MCC team is to develop games to expose and manipulate the premises of such surveillance chronicles and to produce alternatives. These detective games will be played on a mobile computer interface such as a smart phone or laptop. Through alternative quests, the games will produce new data about cities that reveal previously undetected patterns, expanding the notion of urban ethnography.

Meeting in the spring of 2010, the research team will design and playtest diverse game ideas and develop game specifications for longer-term game design projects.

The course has a limited enrollment undergraduate section and a separate, limited enrollment graduate section. Interested students may apply for enrollment by sending their name, email, departmental affiliation, information about their current cell phone, their software development experience (not required), and indications about their current readings and gameplay experiences. Please send all information to Professor Holston (jholston@berkeley.edu) or Professor Niemeyer (niemeyer@berkeley.edu). The deadline for applying for the course is November 30, 2009.