Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces provides a panoramic view of mobile and locative artworks and games, with particular focus on projects made between 2001 and 2007. De Souza e Silva and Sutko frame the papers contained in this collection with an excellent summary of the technological, art historical, and critical currents that flow through location-based mobile games and what they term “hybrid reality games.”

The authors adopt a flexible interdisciplinary perspective in their introduction and selection of papers. Context is provided by the juxtaposition of theories of space, play, and the city (Lefebvre, Huizinga, Benjamin, Debord etc) with design insights from pervasive computing/game practitioners and analysts (Salen and Zimmerman, Weiser, Juul, Montola, etc).

The papers in this anthology address a variety of critical and design questions brought about by the emerging popularity and ubiquity of location-based technologies. The impact of these technologies on our perception of urban space, and the capacity of such technologies to both reconfigure and reinscribe cultural and economic power relations, is a recurrent theme in many of the texts, as are concerns about surveillance and stalking. These risks, however, seem to be outweighed in the minds of the editors by the progressive affordances of locative media, particularly in the realms of community-building and education.