In special regard to physical and digital infrastructures (wifi access points, instance servers, game content among other stuff) there may be ways of leading the players to build, deploy and manage such assets as part of the gameplay. Sort of like MUD’s, let’s say, where players could have a slice of “land” to script their own dungeon or whatever they fancied. Or like Second Life, if you prefer (although I’m not a great fan of it).

In a sense such a view also includes the concept of “Appropriative Gaming”, and even though I am unfamiliar with the term (or had been, untill now), the concept itself has been playing in my mind for some time now.

“What corresponds to the skateboard?”
Well, to pursue the analogy, you can use lots of stuff on a skatepark: skateboards, bikes, rollerblades or even the weirdest contraption you devise. So I guess anything from tangibles to wearables might be adequate, as long as there is a good support framework/communications interface standard.

Ahhh standards… they are so painstaking to define an approve :\

This raises a very interesting point and I recently came across the suggestion that we should start using the term Appropriative Gaming for a lot of what could be called Big Games, pervasive games, mixed reality, alternative reality etc. I quite liked this as in many of the ideas we espouse are about people appropriating public spaces for games and certainly fits with the skateboarding and graffiti