Hitchers is a game for mobile phones that exploits cellular positioning to support location-based play. Players create digital
hitch hikers, giving them names, destinations and questions to ask other players, and then drop them into their current phone
cell. Players then search their current cell for hitchers, pick them up, answer their questions, carry them to new locations
and drop them again, providing location-labels as hint to where they can be found. In this way, hitchers pass from player
to player, phone to phone and cell to cell, gathering information and encouraging players to label cells with meaningful place
names. A formative study of Hitchers played by 47 players over 4 months shows how the seams in cellular positioning, including
varying cell size, density and overlap, affected the experience. Building on previous discussions of designing for uncertainty
and seamful design, we consider five ways of dealing with these seams: removing, hiding, managing, revealing and exploiting
them. This leads us to propose the mechanism of a dynamic search focus, to explore new visualization tools for cellular data,
and to reconsider the general relationship between ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ worlds in location-based games.
Keywords Mobile games - cellular positioning - ubiquitous computing - seamful design