This article provides a historical overview of the development of urban, location-based, and hybrid-reality mobile games. It investigates the extent to which urban spaces have been used as playful spaces prior to the advent of mobile technologies to show how the concept of play has been enacted in urban spaces through three historical tropes of urbanity: first, the transformation of Baudelaire’s flâneur into what Robert Luke (2006) calls the “phoneur”; second, the idea of dérive as used by situationist Guy Débord; and last, the wall subculture called parkour. The authors present a classification of the major types of mobile games to date, addressing how they reenact this older meaning of play apparent within these former tropes of urbanity. With this approach, they hope to address two weaknesses in the current scholarship—namely, differentiating among a range of types of games mediated by mobile technologies and assessing the important effects of playful activities.

In the emerging scholarship on live-streaming sites, the role of gender has been relatively overlooked. This article aims to address this oversight by capturing the controversial rise of nüzhubo (Chinese for ‘female casters’) in the Chinese live-streaming platform, Douyu. Through ethnographic research on Douyu over 2 years, we have witnessed female performers who – motivated by both entrepreneurial spirit and creative agency – have embraced new forms of performative practices in, and around, video game commentary cultures. We begin with a brief contextualizing the gendered nature of media in the history of Chinese video sites and how theories around gender – especially gender performativity – might be adapted. While acknowledging the homogenizing effect of the term nüzhubo, we focus on two performers on Douyu – Hani9 and Nvliu – that are challenging conventional nüzhubo tropes. We argue for a situated notion of gender performativity that also engages with the platform-specific social, cultural and technical infrastructures – ‘platformativity’ to use Thomas Lamarre’s word.

This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016) to the role of mobile media in commodifying (Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of play (Isbister, 2016; Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and game theorists in this commentary highlight, the game sits at the nexus of several technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn; the ubiquity of location-based and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our individual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes; the increasing importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the ongoing augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid experience of the lifeworld.

This paper is based on ongoing research into the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) character customisation of mobile phones in the Asia-Pacific region. Far from illustrating a form of homogeneous Japanisation in the region, consumers are using kawaii customisation in diverse ways to articulate practices of interiority and exteriority, cultural capital and habitus. The dominance of cute character culture (‘cuteness’ or kawairashisa) as the mode for customising/personalising technologies such as mobile phones is very particular to this region. So what does this form of ‘humanising’ the dehumanised technological spaces say about local nuances and tendencies? How is kawairashisa being transformed through its appropriation outside mobile phones (in the form of hanging doll-like forms) and inside the telephonic and net spaces via ‘email pets’, as the region moves into 3G (third generation) mobile net telephony? And why has there been so little work into analysing cultural adaptations of kawairashisa outside Japan despite its apparent ubiquity? In his seminal work on Japanese global cultural production, Koichi Iwabuchi evokes the notion of Japaneseness as being ‘odourless’ (2002). This paper revises the notion of ‘odourlessness’ Japanese global products in relation to the use of kawairashisa adornments inside and outside mobile net telephonic spaces. By sketching some of the ways in which the kawaii has been theorised and the current research into mobile telephony, this paper seeks to outline a framework for understanding the ubiquitous phenomenon of mobile customisation that is still relatively under-theorised and under-researched.

This paper provides a short summary on some of the key debates emerging around visual social media. In particular we discuss the role of camera phones in issues of intimacy and co-presence.

As we look over the last decade, the obvious shifts that can be gleaned are the erosions of once distinct categories such as ‘hardcore’ versus ‘casual’ gamer. Instead, we have witnessed an inversion whereby mobile games, once categorized as ‘casual’, became ‘serious’ and now casual again. With the ubiquity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services along with the transformation of the mobile phone into the multi-mode mobile media, the capacity for mobile location-aware games to teach us new types of experience of place and sketch new cartographies for place has burgeoned. By traversing the online and offline simultaneously through haptic (touch) screens, the possibilities for mobile gaming to teach us new ways of experiencing place upon various levels — that is, not just as a physical geography but technologically, emotionally, psychologically — is endless. In this article I explore the various forms of urban mobile gaming, especially around the experiential and experimental types such as location-based mobile gaming. I focus upon a case study of the Korean mobile game group, Dotplay, in order to flesh out some of the ways in which place reflects, and is inflected by, mobile gaming.