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

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.