Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty

Developing from David Sudnow's accounts of expertise, this article examines the gameplay of Counter-Strike, a popular online game. Although Counter-Strike at first may seem an unsophisticated pursuit, players display remarkable dexterity developed through many hours of play. Through participating in the game and analyzing videos of gameplay, we examine Counter-Strike as an example of expert technology use. As players move beyond the mere physical prowess of chaining their movements with the environment, they develop a sense of the terrain of play as a contingent tactically oriented understanding, rather than as static spatial knowledge. Relatedly, we provide the beginnings of an alternative account of both games and expertise which brings out something of what it is to play a specific game, as opposed to games in general. Moreover, rather than presenting a disengaged general model of skill, the article considers how we might access and describe the situated skills of gameplay.