Misadventure in Little Lon: augmented reality and the question of historical ’presence’

True Crime Games is an award winning Melbourne-based game company headed by artist and designers Andy Yong and Emma Ramsay. This paper explores the first of their games–Misadventure in Little Lon – a case study that brings to light local histories that have been lost, elided or marginalized in traditional accounts of Melbourne and its development around the time of Federation. Drawing upon the phenomenology of Vivian Sobchack and the microhistory of Carlo Ginzburg, the article argues that implementing AR in historically driven game contexts allows for an improved grasp of the microhistory of a specific area. It does this by bringing the agency to the 'ghost in the machine' –characters in the AR game who enable players to resituate themselves and reorientate themselves to city streets through game play. This method of resituating historical sources so that players discover 'opaque zones', new ways of viewing located history that encourages reading 'against the grain' , is coincidental with important archaeological work that has been undertaken in the Little Lon district of Melbourne. Misadventure in Little Lon therefore joins a larger effort to reveal, circulate and celebrate the communities, individuals, and stories that traditional histories have ignored.