Healthy Living

The Hidden Playground

Imagine this emerging genre as the digital equivalent of a "seeing stone." The seeing stone shows up in a number of modern fairytales, including Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's The Spiderwick Chronicles and Neil Gaiman's Coraline. A primitively carved totem, its key feature is the eye-sized hole in its center. By looking through this hole, the children in these stories are able to see aspects of the world that are usually invisible to humans: magic, fairies, portals to other dimensions, ghosts and goblins and even other people's souls. The idea that the world around us is much more magical than it seems has clear links with childhood traditions of outdoor play and make-believe.

Digital games can perform a similar function to seeing stones by subverting the mundane character of things like streetlamps and trash bins. When playing Treasure World, any neighborhood with a concentration of Wi-Fi hotspots is transformed into an endless playground. The game converts wireless signals found throughout the real world into in-game treasures, which kids access by detecting the signal with their Nintendo DS. The café becomes a pirate's hat, while a walk around the block produces the stardust needed to fuel your spaceship.

You can find a similar emphasis on discovering the secret and the enchanted within the everyday in The Hidden Park. The application uses GPS and pre-programmed maps to draw players into a treasure hunt that involves tracking down magical, endangered animals. When located, the animals and other magical objects appear as animations mapped onto digital photographs the player takes with the iPhone's camera. The game also draws on user-generated content, enabling players (or their parents) to create their own maps using the game's "Park Builder" feature to add to the original list of maps created by Bulpadok.

Of course, what we're really talking about here is imagination. What the free-range kids movement actually aims for is sufficient space and opportunities for kids to create imaginative games, play themes and storylines for themselves. Games like The Hidden Park and Treasure World aren't a substitute for non-digitally-enhanced outdoor play. They could never replace the unbridled creativity and physical activity that come with a regular diet of spontaneous adventuring and Double Dutch marathons.

But what is promising about these seeing stone games is the way in which they open up space for those more imaginative and autonomous forms of play. By breaking down existing definitions of what an urban or suburban landscape is, how it should be experienced and what kids are expected to do there, games like The Hidden Park put forth a direct challenge to the idea that public space is inappropriate and dangerous for kids. Once this space is opened up, so is the play potential. That's really all that outdoor play and the wilderness of childhood have ever needed to thrive.

Sara Grimes is a doctoral student in communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and blogs at Gamine Expedition . Her favourite outdoor game was and always will be flashlight tag.