P.I.G.S. and city: Playing with guilt and truth in the streets of Athens Elina Roinioti Maria Saridaki Department of Communication, Media and Culture Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences Athens, Greece eleni.roinioti@gmail.com Department of Communication and Media Studies National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Athens, Greece msaridaki@media.uoa.gr Georgios Hiotis, Dimitris Arabatzis Playopticons Athens, Greece hiotisgeorgios@gmail.com, dimitris.arabatzis@gmail.com Abstract. In this paper we will present a location-based propaganda game called P.I.G.S. Through game narrative and mechanisms, we will examine how an urban game can question the social norms of the city space and become a vehicle for political expression. The concepts of stigma, guilt and surveillance are central to our analysis. Using field notes from the actual game sessions, we will analyze how the players perceived and incorporated its meanings. Keywords: location-based games; propaganda ; politics; stigma; urban space; game design I. INTRODUCTION What’s the common ground between a “busker”i living in Great Britain in 1860, a young boy living in the 19th century, a tattle-tale columnist socially active in 1920, a skateboarder living in California in 1950 and a group of immigrants living in Athens in 2013? These are all characteristic examples of how play- as an activity and at the same time as an aesthetic categoryencapsulates a cultural and a ritualistic element of social life [1]. Boyhood in the 19th century for example, was a social category containing the free outdoor and away from parental control, playing. During these freeplaying hours, the boy physically and intellectually challenged himself and his “significant others” [2] for respect and power. This kind of ritual passage to manhood through play [3] has similarities with the playful social activities of the high society in the first decades of 1900. The moral responsibility toward the poor, which historically was associated with charity as a proof of a worthy life [4] manifest itself through the first scavenger hunt, organized by Elsa Maxwell, ¨an Iowai A person who entertains in a public place for gratuities born party planner, impresario, gossip columnist, etiquette authority, and press agent”ii.According to an article in Gettysburg Times in 1933, her party games were compared to fraternity initiations. The second common aspect of the before mentioned case studies, is their tendency to provoke the lived space through play and games and produce new spaces of social meaning. A busker living and working in the 19th century makes the city street his/her personal theatre and in a way he “appropriates the cognitive space of public space, of everyday space, and functions in an interventionist fashion” [5]. A skateboarder “surfing” in the urban space imposes alternative playful meanings upon the city setting, rejects any physical urban restrains and at the same time expands the limits of the city [6]. Albanian immigrants, exclusively men, living in Athens, Greece, in 2013, get together in a daily basis in their neighbourhood square to play domino game and chess while friends or bystanders watching and participating as active spectators. This daily ritual is a way of reliving a traditional custom and in consequence, reappropriating the foreign streets of Athens. Hence, just like Baudelaire’s flâneur who “merges the “serious” space of the city with the ludic activity of casual walk... eliminating the boundaries of a distinct and separate play space” [7], the busker or the skateboarded or even the Albanian immigrants, use play About Elsa Maxwell see “Elsa Maxwell, the Kingmaker” , The Daily Beast, Nov 1, 2012, Staggs S., 2012, or S. Staggs Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World, St. Martin's Press,2012 or Gettysburg Times November 13, 1933 http://news.google.com/newspapersnid=2202&dat=19331113&id=W SAmAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Kv0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=5527,4962683 ii and games to transform the social norms of the city space, expanding its boundaries and highlighting the “betweenness of place” [8]. The politics of occupation changes and in the core of this concept lay the games. Up: Greece 2013 Down: Albania 2013 Fig. 1. In My Element: Base Camp  Application of technology or to what extent these games incorporates technology. For example, the Big Urban Game is a kind of race between three different teams, each of them trying to move a 25- foot high inflatable game piece through specific checkpointsiii, whilst Can you see me now? is a mixed-reality game where online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by up to four street players, who must run through the actual city streets in order to capture them [12]. II.  Purpose of the game. Having fun and engage oneself in a social experience, seems to be the basic reason for a person to participate in an urban game. From a designer’s perspective though, each game is a complicated system that promotes sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden meanings and almost always, serves specific purposes. Dead Drop for example combines location-based mechanisms, real action play and opportunities for local business for in-game advertising. By contrast, Mogi is a spatial-aware game [13] played in Tokyo in 2003. The goal was to collect items spattered around the city, using GPS and an electronic map. One of the targets of the game was to give the opportunity to the players to explore their city in a different and more adventurous way. URBAN GAMES AND THE CITY The term urban game is used broadly for games played in the city area. Urban games “may range from low-tech interventions and psycho-geographic walks based on a simple algorithm to hi-tech hybrid reality games” [9], can be finite or infinite [10], can be played in both the physical and virtual world, are mainly multiplayer and they can be played in a specified time and space but more than often, they don’t. On the basis of how urban games use and recreate the urban space, two main categories emerge [11]: The city as a pop up game. This term is used for arena-type of games i.e. games which occupy a limited space; their boundaries are clear and primarily visible to everybody (players and spectators). As DeLuca and Bertolo mentions [11], “the game exists as a potential that is waiting for its player to come and awaken it to life”. Game examples are the urban chess-board, Hopscotch, In My Element: Base Camp etc. City as a big playground. This is the case of many well known games like The Big Urban Game, Dead Drop, Botfighters, Mogi, Can you see me now? which all share one common element- their tendency to approach the city as a playful environment with vast ludic perspectives. During these games, a game layer seems to be projected over the urban environment changing even temporarily the social norms of the city. Games that use the city space as a playground do not form a homogeneous game category. Their differences can be described as follows:  Integration of reality or in other words, the extent to which the game space transcends the urban space. While the inevitable question whether “these urban/ locative/casual games “colonise” or “enrich” those spaces” [9] remain unanswered and needs further investigation, urban games' effect, ranks from total immersion of the real space into the game sphere where “all actions [in real life] are game moves” [14] to temporary and partial occupation of the city space. The so-called location-based games are a specific kind of urban game whose gameplay relies mainly on iii http://www.decisionproblem.com/bug/bug2.html positioning systems like GPS. In the sections below, we are going to present and analyze a location-based game called P.I.G.S and investigate how a game may political reclaim a city like Athens, Greece. III. P.I.G.S, A PROPAGANDA GAME P.I.G.S is a multiplayer location-based propaganda game, for up to 48 players split into four opposing teams and played with Smartphones. P.I.G.S whose name refers to the degrading acronym that was given to the economies of Mediterranean by international analysts, is a game of reverse management of the Spoiled Identity. But what we mean with this phrase borrowed from Goffman’s study of stigma [15]? To begin with, since 2008 we have witness an attempt to construct a new transnational collective identity for Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain under the label of P.I.G.S. This kind of identity was not attributed based on a similar socioeconomic environment or a possible cultural convergence, but was rather imposed by financial markets to those countries that considered to have heavily-debt economies. Political theorists will argue that the formation of a collective identity isn’t bounded with the traditional characteristics of ground, blood or even myth. So to use Benedict Anderson’s phrasing, the “imagined community” [16] of P.I.G.S, has being formed in order to label a new socioeconomic and political zone, the symbol of which is the common pig. But what happens when the identity under construction or the projected symbol (like the pig) is the result of a classification from above and not the outcome of an inter-subjective cultural procedure? The answer is stigma or as Goffman mentions the “attribute that spoils the identity of the affected Individual” [15] or in our case of the affected countries. The media talked about the P.I.G.S, shared degrading photos and comments, creating and supporting in this way, a negative image for four different countries and its people. Eugene Trivizas, the well know criminologist, mentioned that this acronym is a contemporary form of the historical phenomenon of calling into question the human nature of a fellow man; a process according to which members of a nationality degrade the members of another, in the level of animals, spreading the message that they are worthy of receiving similar treatment as animalsiv. This produced mental images function as social stigma affecting and infecting the individual’s identity, which in our case refers to entire ethnic groups. This exact stigma and the shame or guilt that follows it, is what the game P.I.G.S is all about; inviting people to adopt the role of the accused one, to make their stigma visible and play with the concepts of guilt and scapegoating. A. The game narrative The game P.I.G.S takes place in an imaginary society, influenced from Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all kinds of animal lived together peacefully. The Farmer took good care of The Garden and its animals by selling the Amazing Apples of the Great Apple Tree. Until one day the Farmer discovered that someone had eaten the Apples and everybody immediately accused the four pig tribes. Since they could not tell who among them is the guilty one, the Wise Black Eagle decided that they should all take the blame and exile all the Pig tribes from the Garden, all except one; the one that would prevail in a vicious struggle for survival. The game starts at this exact point where the four pig tribes, carrying their initials of their deadly sins i.e. P for pride, I for insolence, G for gluttony and S for sloth, must face each other. B. Rules of the game The main goal is to prevail against the other tribes and the only way to succeed on it is to find the guilty P.I.G.S of the other team and of course to protect your teammates. The only weapon available is your Smartphone with which you can take a photo of an opponent and symbolically “capture” or tag him. Each tribe consists of one Uber Pig, one Street Pig and ten Common Pigs, a vertical hierarchy that adds a strategic element to the game experience. The Uber Pig is the general who oversees the entire battle online through a specialized web platform and prepare the tribe’s strategy. The Street Pig is on a bike/skate providing information to the Uber Pig and being the direct link with the common Pigs. The Common Pigs are the soldiers. Each common Pig has a QR code on its shirt which corresponds to its personal number. The Common Pigs try to take photos of the opposing pigs and at the same time avoid being photographed. In each team there are two guilty pigs “hiding” among them. The true identity of them is not known to anyone, not even to the guilty ones. This design choice was made in order to support a basic narrative element: the fact that guilt as a false attribute, acting at the same time as a social and political release valve [17], can be attributed to anyone indiscriminately. iv The original text in greek can be found here: http://tvxs.gr/userpost/%CE%BF%CE%B5%CF%85%CE%B3%CE %AD%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82%CF%84%CF%81% CE%B9%CE%B2%CE%B9%CE%B6%CE%AC%CF%82%CE%B3 %CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%BF%CE%BD%CF%8C%CF%81%CE%BF-pigs. Fig. 1. The Uber’s platform Brother, controlling and inspecting everything. As for the Common Pigs, the game space is being identified with the user space or in other words with their own actions. They are under the immediate orders of their General, oblige to deliver results, but at the same time, it’s their choice whether or not will share the information they gathered. This behaviour, which is marginally permissible and acceptable in relation to the social contract of the game, gives back to the common pigs their long lost subjectivity. Fig. 3. The mobile application Fig. 2. The victory conditions are two: A) to eliminate your opponents or in other words to photograph twice the guilty pigs of the rival tribes and b) to gather all the necessary clues which are scattered around the game space, to solve the hidden Riddle of Truth and in this way gain impunity. C. Application and game’s mechanism For the purposes of the game, three different applications were developed, each of which collects, processes and transmits different amount of information, allowing at the same time the players to experience different degrees of visibility and thus in a more abstract concept, different levels of surveillance. As expected, the Uber Pig is in an advantageous position, standing in front of a web platform in which he/she can see the position of every player in the game and be informed in real time about the hits his team has received and has brought about to the opposing teams. On the other hand and as far as the mobile players are concerned (Street and Common), the game has been designed so as to support a specific “state of being” [18]: to be connected and tracked at the same time. According to Benford et al [18] a player can be either connected and tracked, tracked but not connected, connected but not tracked and finally, neither connected nor tracked, in which their application in use does not know its location and cannot communicate with other players. In our case, even though everybody was in a state of being connected and tracked, they did not share the same game experience. Specifically, the Street Pig could see all the Common Pigs of his tribe and could be seen only from his Uber Pig, whilst the Common Pigs were only aware of their own related position. In other words, both they were connected and tracked but not in the same way and definitely without enjoying the same benefits. This kind of differentiation has a direct effect upon players' game experience, producing different perspective of the game itself and the game space in general. For the Uber Pig, for example, the map becomes as Lammes mentions [19] “a game-board that constantly incorporates the physical and spatial activities of players on the move [...], the players become pawns inscribed on the map”. In this way, the Uber Pig symbolically acquires the role of a Big D. D. Uncertainty and the alternative version of the game When designing a location-based game there are many things that have to be taken into account. Uncertainty associated with sensing and wireless communications [12, 18] is an important issue that might affect the entire game experience. P.I.G.S is a game that needs constant Wi-Fi connection, without which the “orchestration” [18] or the real time management of the game was almost impossible. Combined with few technical problems that also arose, we designed a backup low-tech version of the game were players assumed the same roles but used only a QR code reader for collecting clues and “hitting” opponents. The macro-management of the game took place in real time and space, overseeing the score of every team, keeping track of time and applying punishments to whoever violated the given time limits. The extra mechanisms that were added, was first, that the game run in time-based turns and second, the phase of the “pig sacrifice” for whoever trespassed these time limits. During the “pig sacrifice”, all the players formed a circle inside which the pig that didn't get back to his/her headquarters in time, stepped into. For 5 seconds he or she was at the mercy of his/her opponents who photographed him/her. E. Evaluating the game P.I.G.S as a propaganda game aims to:  Make a political international events. comment on current  Create an urban game that will convert the public space of Athens into a game platform, where once again the city will become a field of social and political dialogue.  Promote a sideline aspect of play: play as a mean of personal, social and political expression and new technologies becomes the vehicle for that.  Luring people into a game of lost identity and guilt. Based on field notes collected during the playtesting and the actual game session in Athens Plaython Festival in 2012 and the after game dynamics, we will examine how and in what extent the before mentioned goals were actually achieved. In general P.I.G.S was well received by the players and seemed to intrigue the bystanders. The random and concealed choice of the real identity of the guilty pigs, the mechanism of the “pig sacrifice”, the constant Fig. 4. During the playtesting chasing of each other, were the basic frames through which the concepts of guilt/ innocence, justice/injustice and the survival of the strongest, structured. Their rhetorical power seemed to be well perceived by the players. In particularly a female player said: “It felt that everyone was guilty and at the same time no one questioned why and if this was true. I did not care about my innocence, I only cared about not revealing my QR code and send as much QR codes as I could from the other teams" (female 32, 25/09/2012, during the playtesting), while another said "I had no idea who was the guilty one in our tribe, it might have been me for all I knew. This was stressful and fun at the same time" (female 35, 25/09/2012, during the playtesting). The feeling of inconvenience that was nurtured and sustained through the above game mechanisms, can be illustrated through the words of a 26 year female player, "Running around with QR codes in my body, felt as an animal being chased. At the same time I was able to do it myself to my hunters." (Female 26, 30/09/2012, during the Athens Plaython Festival). The correlation with the contemporary political and economical “game” which takes place today in a transnational level, was successfully embedded in the phase of the “pig's sacrifice”. Creating an instant and improvised arena as a punitive system, the symbolic violence of the contemporary political system came to life; "when I was brought to the middle and chased by all other tribes I felt stressed [...] I felt as if I had a moment of unjust open trial. For me this made the connection with the political issue much stronger." (Female 24, 30/09/2012, during the Athens Plaython Festival). Observation and the negotiation of surveillance were central to our game and public spaces in general, incorporate different ways of observing and being observed. For example a playground can be secluded by the general public but should always provide surveillance to the parents and caretakers. When designing P.I.G.S. we tried to acknowledge the influence of Bhentham’s Panopticon and Foucault’s [21] suggestion of the embodiment of once external control mechanisms, while preserving the playfulness idea of “throwing the blame to someone else” in a much embodied way- through running and interaction. Through the political-ideological significance of narrative and the game's mechanisms, the social contract of the game was set up; it was the players' turn to act upon them and in a way to give life to the “performance frame” of the game [20]. While some truly embedded their given role, "I really thought about cheating and stealing some [information] QR Codes on the wall but I wasn't left alone with them by opposite tribe members. I felt like a naughty pig so why play fair in the first place?" (Female 35, 30/09/2012, during the Athens Plaython Festival), the pursuit of victory guided their actions. Without supporting a ludo-narratological model [22], in P.I.G.S just like in most games “is the performance of game moves that consumes most of a player’s cognitive resources” [23] and from this point the immediate goals of the game and thus the achievement of victory, becomes the first priority. For urban games such as P.I.G.S, it is a question whether the narrative frame stays with the player and guides his/her moves or dissolves behind the game mechanisms. On the other hand and as the framing of a situation may “not fully created ‘on the spot’, but can be mediated through time and space over media and cultural memory within an individual” [24] the political performance of P.I.G.S, took also place through media and meta-game discussions with the players and bystanders. The production and reinterpretation of symbols like the use of the pig or the QR code on the players' T-shirts which made them look like a moving target or a prey; the game itself as a spectacle occupying a specific place and time in the Athens' city life; the externalization of common feelings and thoughts and their inclusion to the public debate, are all manifestation of the game's political performance [25], a performance that acquired it’s completed form during the after game “session”. The bystanders for example, not being part of the game system, approached and decoded the gamerelated events through the semiotic of ordinary life [14] and thus they captured the political and social context of the game to the fullest. In the same way, an article written in a local newspaper about P.I.G.S and its social meanings provoked two interrelated results: first, to present P.I.G.S to the public and indirectly to promote games in general, as an alternative way of expressing sociopolitical matters. Through media exposure and for a brief period of time, the public discourse around games changed. Games became a reference also for adults (our players were from 25-40 years old), addressing common concerns and fears. The second result was that through game's publicity, the public street of Athens became once again a place of political dialogue, a place where everybody may take the stance. As we have documented, the meaning generated through P.I.G.S.’s gameplay is socially and politically relevant, combining the relevance of contemporary Smartphone technology and the political status of being accused and stigmatized while notions of surveillance, life strategy and distribution of information are being imposed to the players. Further theoretical and research analysis upon location-based propaganda games or Serious Urban Games [26] like P.I.G.S, is needed in order to examine in depth these kinds of phenomena, as disruptive as may be. REFERENCES [1] J .Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Boston: BeaconPress, 1971 [2] A. Haller and J. “Woelfel. Identifying significant others and measuring their expectations for a person”, in Proceedings of Actes du Vingt-Deuxieme Congres de l'institut International de Sociologie [Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Congress of the International Institute of Sociology], Rome. International Journal of Sociology, no5, 1969 [3] H. Jenkins. “Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces”, in Cassell and Jenkins (ed), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, The MIT Press, 1999 [4] M.E. Gettleman. “Charity and Social Classes in the United States, 1874-1900, I”, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol 22, No2, April 1963, pp. 314 – 329 [5] M. Flanagan. Critical Play: Radical Game Design, The MIT Press, 2009 [6] M. Montola, J. Stenros and A. Waern. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design , CRC Press, 2009 [7] A. de Souza e Silva and L. Hjorth. “Playful Urban Spaces: A Historical Approach to Mobile Games”, Simulation & Gaming, Vol40, No 5, Sage Publications, 2009 [8] O. Sotamaa. “All The World's A Botfighter Stage: Notes on Location-based Multi-User Gaming”, proceedings of the Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference CDGC , Finland, June 2002 [9] M. de Lange. The Mobile City project and urban gaming, Second Nature, Issue No.2, November 2009 [10] J. P. Carse. Finite and Infinite Games, New York: Ballantine Books, 1987 [11] V. De Luca and M. Bertolo. “Urban Games to Design the Augmented City”, Eludamos, Journal for Computer Game Culture, 6 (1), 2012 , pp. 71-83 [12] S. Benford, C. Magerkurth and P. Ljungstrand. “Bridging the physical and digital in pervasive gaming”,Communications of the ACM, Vol. 48, No. 3, March 2005, pp 54-57 [13] D.Nicklas, Ch. Pfisterer, B. Mitschang. Towards LocationBased Games. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Applications and Development of Computer Games in the 21st Century: ADCOG 21. Hongkong Special Administrative Region, China, 2001, pp. 61-67 [14] F. Von Borries, S. P. Waltz and M. Böttger. Space, play and time, Birkhäuser Architecture, 2007 [15] E. Goffman. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Simon & Schuster Inc, 1963 [16] B. Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso; New Edition edition, 2006 [17] T. Douglas. Scapegoats: Transferring Blame Routledge, 1995 [18] S. Benford, A.Crabtree, M. Flintham, A. Drozd, R. Anastasi, M. Paxton, N. Tandavanitj, M. Adams, and J. Row Farr, "Can You See Me Now? ",ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, vol. 13 (1), 2006, pp. 100-133 [19] S. Lammes. “The map as playground: Locationbased games as cartographical practices”, in Proceedings of DiGRA Conference: Think Design Play, 2011 [20] S. Benford, A.Crabtree, S. Reeves, M. Flintham, A. Drozd, J. Sheridan and A. Dix "The frame of the game: blurring the boundary between fiction and reality in mobile experiences", in Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2006, pp. 427-436 [21] M. Foucault. Discipline and punish. London: Penguin, 1975 [22] E. Aaserth. “A narrative theory of games”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, ACM Library,2012 [23] C.A. Lindley. “The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design”, Game Studies: International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol5, issue1, October 2005 http://www.gamestudies.org/0501/lindley/ [24] S. Deterning, “The Game Frame: Systemizing a Goffmanian Approach to Video Game Theory”, in proceedings of Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory, Digra 2009 [25] C. Tilly. Stories, Identities and Political Change. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 2002 [26] G. Ferri, P. Coppock, “Srious Urban Games. From play in the city to play for the city”, presented at the Media & the City Workshop, ECREA Working Group, Milan, 2012