Locating the Game: Location-Based Services (LBSs) and Playful Visualities

Abstract

While Hyunjin waits for Soohyun in a café in Shinchon (Seoul, South Korea) she toys with her Samsung Galaxy, experimenting with a few of the photo apps she’s recently downloaded. She particularly likes Instagram and applies a filter to transform her ordinary coffee into a polaroid picture from yesteryear. She appreciates the fact that she can send, share, and geotag her image almost immediately through various forms of social media such as Twitter and Facebook. But most of her friends use Kakao—the social mobile media platform that features its own inbuilt suite of filters and affords almost instant sharing across KakaoStory. With her downloaded KakaoStory photo app (which has the look and feel of Instagram), Hyunjin imports her Instagram picture and uploads to Kakao. With a photo album feature, online cyber room, IM capacities, and a games suite, Kakao allows her to shift in and out of online and offline modes, and between social and gameworlds while on the move. With Kakao, she finds she is never alone even when she may be physically separate from others.