Growing up doesn't mean abandoning play

Back in 2009, Cipher Prime was showing off our game Auditorium at a tech meetup in Brooklyn. There was another fun little company giving a talk there, about their new game where people could “check-in” to real life locations for points and perks.

That game was called Foursquare.

Foursquare's talk was about a problem they had making check-ins work: the GPS on your phone isn’t that accurate, so there was no easy way to know the exact establishment you were hanging out at. How do I know from your GPS that you are at Freddie’s Franks and not at the gas station across the street?

With a lot of math, and a little machine learning, they'd figured out how to triangulate your GPS and cell phone data and build a database to pinpoint, with increasing accuracy, exactly where you were. That was the killer feature that made the app work, and Foursquare blew up, becoming nearly inescapable as we crossed into the 2010s. The fad of checking in everywhere died off within a couple years; getting people to check-in places as a lark isn't a profitable business model.

But being able to pinpoint a person's exact address based on their GPS location is.

Before long, Foursquare was licensing their geolocation database out to other tech companies. By 2016, Uber's ability to pick you up based on where you called your ride was powered by Foursquare’s platform.

Seventeen years after that initial meeting, Foursquare is now “the future of geospatial technology,” and their look has grown up to match:

This is what a grown-up company is supposed to be. All of the play is gone; all of the connection is lost; all of the initial spark and drive has been stripped away in favor of the cold utility of tracking humans for profit.

As an artist, I explore interaction both in-person and online. I'm especially interested in the ways those two spaces intersect. It’s the start of my third career, after spending a decade in indie games and half that in journalism. By all accounts, I am adult¹, and “should” be progressing into more “grown up” pursuits. But I can’t shake the feeling that the elimination of play from the public space is robbing us of our humanity.

We shouldn’t need studies to tell us play is good for us.

Foursquare’s journey may look similar to enshittification, but it’s meaningfully distinct. It’s not that they squeezed users for profit and attention—they simply abandoned the idea of being “playful” to become something more serious, more profitable, more “adult.” (Niantic, makers of Pokémon GO, just followed the same path.)

And still, venues where adults can just play are few and far between. There are frighteningly few places that we can just exist, let alone play, without needing to spend money (shout out to your local libraries and game shops).

We shouldn’t need studies to tell us play is good for us to invest in spaces that make play possible, accessible, and self-sustaining. Growing up isn’t letting go of childish things; it’s taking responsibility for creating a world where play is respected, championed, and available for all.

1. Citation needed. ↩︎