Seize
Seize is an Augmented Reality Game workshop inviting players to re-map their personal experiences within physical environments. In this project, we create a mobile augmented reality game named Seize to invite players in Shanghai, China, to create a playful space for accessibility, connection, and sharing emotions collectively in the context of the post-pandemic time. The game is a remembrance and healing of the lockdown. This game is a continuation of a series of virtual games organized during the lockdown in Shanghai from March to June 2022 at virtual meeting platforms for constructing a mutual connection. In this game, walking is the key mechanic and a tool to re-configure, recognize, and re-experience the urban landscape. It is an expansion to the physical space for addressing the restrictions of the Chinese social, cultural, and political context. The process of making inherits the methodology of critical game design. The game playtesting will invite the locals in Shanghai to play, evaluate, discuss, and share collectively as a community. This project is inspired by the long history of walking as a form of protest from Walter Benjamin’s writing about Flâneur to later International Situationalist movement. City is remapped and reimagined through walking which creates a different sense of time and space. The emerging of locative media in recent decades leveraged by game designer to remap the reality with the mediation of mobile technologies.
We Organized three workshops in Shanghai, China and one re-enactment in Cape Town, South Africa:
1) April 27th, 2023 East Normal University Main participants: college students
2) May 18th, 2023 Zhong Shan Park Main participants: Artist
3) June 1st, 2023 Bookstore Main participants: Game designer, painter
4) August, 2023 Cape Town Part of ICC Art & Cartography Pre-conference Workshop