The Forest as Playground: Reimagining More-than-Human Relations in Location-Based Games

Abstract

Location-based games use GPS, mobile devices, and augmented reality to blend physical and digital space. Increasingly, these games extend play beyond cities and into forests, reserves, and other more-than-human landscapes, framed as tools for promoting ecological connection and sustainability. Yet they frequently reproduce anthropocentric and extractive logics, treating more-than-human worlds as resources for player progression, rather than more complex, interdependent environments. Using a conceptual lens based on ecological orientations of respect, reciprocity, and restoration, this article examines two experimental Australian AR projects—Virtual Footprints and Epiphyte—that challenge these conventions. Drawing on creator interviews and field observation, I argue that these projects use their small scale and fragility to challenge extractive models of location-based play, while revealing the limits of ecological care within digital infrastructures.