Uncle Roy All Around You

Uncle Roy All Around You is a mixed reality game and performance by the British artists' group Blast Theory, made with the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Nottingham and first staged in central London in late May and early June 2003. Street players carried handheld computers through the city in search of a fictional character called Uncle Roy, while online players moved through a parallel 3D model of the same streets, followed the street players' progress and could message them to help or hinder them. Its makers describe its defining characteristic as the way it "mixes pre-programmed game content with live performance that takes place on the city streets", so that it can be considered "both game and theatre".

The work is a pervasive, location-based mixed reality game, and several research papers analyse it. Its research team used the 2003 staging to test "self-reported positioning", in which players located themselves on an electronic map instead of relying on GPS, and published studies of positioning, game design and behind-the-scenes orchestration at DiGRA 2003, UbiComp 2004 and Advances in Computer Entertainment (ACE) 2004. The central theme of the piece is trust in strangers; it ends by asking players whether they will commit to help an unknown fellow player for the next year.

Reviewed 7 October 2026. Checked premiere, gameplay, technology, positioning statistics, orchestration, reception, awards and later stagings against the DiGRA 2003 and ACE 2004 papers, the UbiComp 2004 abstract, Blast Theory and MRL pages, the Icon review, and Crossref metadata for the cited chapters. About review dates.

How it worked

Blast Theory notes that its own description covers the June 2003 premiere at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, and that "the work was changed significantly in subsequent presentations". The account below follows that premiere.

Street players

Street players bought a ticket for a slot lasting at most one hour. No more than ten street players could be in the game at once, because of technical and staffing limits. At the venue they handed over their personal possessions, including bags, wallets, mobile phones and keys, in exchange for a handheld computer; the research team describes this as a ritual meant to increase anticipation, vulnerability, dependence on Uncle Roy and isolation from the everyday city. Blast Theory adds that each street player was photographed and received a unique code that started a 60-minute countdown on the device. An actor briefed them that their mission was to meet Uncle Roy.

The handheld showed an interactive map. Players panned it by dragging a "me" icon with a stylus and pressed an "I am here" button to declare their position to Uncle Roy. Each declaration returned a short text clue. Uncle Roy was not played by an actor: the clues were preprogrammed and attached to zones of the game map, with one clue for a player's first declaration in a zone and a different one for later declarations. Some clues were useful, while others were deliberately misleading, such as an instruction to follow a tourist crossing a bridge, who was simply a passer-by. The trail ended with the clue "Go to number 12 Waterloo Place and ring the buzzer marked Roy." Street players could also receive text messages from online players and could reply by recording short audio clips of seven seconds.

Online players

Online players began on a web page with background information and instructions, then waited in a queue, since only ten online players could be in the game at the same time. Once admitted they controlled an avatar in a 3D model of the game area with the keyboard arrow keys, met other online players and could send public text chat. Cards showed each street player's name, gender, appearance and the photograph taken at registration. A street player's estimated position appeared as a pulsing red sphere, and each explicit declaration was highlighted with radiating lines, a sound effect and the text of Uncle Roy's reply. Online players could find photo objects in the model that displayed pictures of the real streets, including one of Uncle Roy's office door, and could pass this information to street players by private message.

The office, the limousine and the contract

At the office door the handheld switched to a timed script. The street player pressed a buzzer, entered a deserted office and found a postcard asking "when can you begin to trust a stranger?" Blast Theory describes the office as a typical 1970s executive office with an architect's desk and Radio 4 playing from a radio, and a model of the surrounding city made of Post-it notes; a nearby monitor ran an augmented reality display showing that Post-it city populated by all current street and online players.

The street player then waited in a telephone box. A phone call directed them to a waiting limousine, where an actor asked a series of questions about trust in strangers, told them that another player elsewhere in the game was answering the same questions, and asked whether they would enter a year-long contract to help that stranger if called upon. Meanwhile online players were invited into the office, where a live webcam let them see the street player in person for the first time, and were asked the same questions. After the game, street and online players who had agreed were paired up manually and sent each other's contact details. Matt Adams of Blast Theory later said the group decided "really early on that we wouldn't track those relationships", because it wanted them to stay private.

Technology and orchestration

The game ran on the research team's own game server and communications software. The server managed shared game state and player positions, handled text and audio messages, served clues from colour-coded maps, queued online players, and stored player details in an SQL database. The street players' client was written in Flash and the online client in Shockwave, and the handhelds connected over commercial GPRS mobile networks. Blast Theory describes the street devices as loaned personal digital assistants (PDAs).

The London game area measured roughly 1,600 metres east to west by 1,200 metres north to south, centred on the ICA, with St James's Park to the south. It was divided into 49 regions covering about one square kilometre, ranging from about 150 by 150 metres in the park to about 10 by 10 metres in narrow streets. Clues were assigned by colouring the game map, which let the artists draw irregular regions and adjust the clue trail easily.

Self-reported positioning

The team rejected GPS for this work. Its experience with the earlier chase game Can You See Me Now? had shown occasional position errors of hundreds of metres and, in its view a bigger problem, unpredictable gaps in coverage between city buildings; members of the public with no experience of GPS would be the ones carrying the devices. Position was instead "self-reported": explicitly, when players pressed "I am here", and implicitly, from where they panned the map view.

During the London run, 272 street players generated 5,309 explicit declarations and 18,610 map manipulations, an average of 0.9 declarations and 9 map manipulations per minute. By filming 10 street players and comparing their recorded and reported locations, the team estimated an average error of 25 metres for declarations and 39 metres for map manipulations. The UbiComp 2004 study of the same data found that remote players were "largely untroubled" by this error, because street players tended to declare plausible locations such as common landmarks, points ahead of themselves (stating their intent), or places already visited. The authors proposed self-reported positioning as a possible fallback when automated positioning is unavailable or unreliable.

Orchestration

A behind-the-scenes control room held two technical crew members who watched the game through a management interface, could change any player's state (for example, advancing them to the next phase) and could improvise text messages and new clues in Uncle Roy's voice. Three crew members on the streets helped players whose devices failed, most often because of lost GPRS connections, and two more managed the flow of players through the office, telephone box and limousine. A public spectator view on a large plasma display at the ICA cycled a virtual camera among the online players. The DiGRA paper divides the work's content into three layers: preprogrammed content, live performance (including communication between players), and orchestration.

History

Blast Theory describes Uncle Roy All Around You as its third collaboration with the MRL, after Desert Rain (1999) and Can You See Me Now? (2001), and says it set out "to examine what it's like to create a situation where you have to trust people online". The research papers acknowledge support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the Equator project, the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), Arts Council England and Microsoft Research; BT Exact researchers were co-authors. Blast Theory and the MRL also list British Telecom, an AHRB Innovation Award, Equator and Arts Council England's National Touring Programme as supporters.

The premiere ran for two weeks in late May and early June 2003, based at the ICA. The work was later presented at Cornerhouse in Manchester, in collaboration with Digital Summer, and at The Public in West Bromwich as part of the Fierce! festival. Reviewing the Manchester staging in the July/August 2004 issue of Icon, Sean Dodson reported a 40-minute time limit and wrote that the weak point for him was the lack of contact with online players, from whom he received only one prompt.

Reception

In London the work was played by 272 street players. The DiGRA 2003 paper gives the number of online players as over 200, while the later ACE 2004 paper gives over 440. The ACE paper quotes London's Metro, which called it "one of the most exhilarating theatrical experiences you'll encounter", and the Sunday Times, which wrote that "if such performances were supported and nurtured by the artistic establishment, Britain could produce its first new theatrical form for years".

The research team drew on ethnographic observation, system logs and 100 questionnaires completed by street players directly after playing. Street players often described the experience with words such as "uncertainty", "mistrust", "paranoia" and "fear", and the team judged it compelling for them. Online players' reactions were more mixed: some were confused about the game's purpose and their role, and the team concluded that the online experience worked best for people who had first played on the streets. Common complaints from street players were dropped GPRS connections, which sometimes forced waits of minutes or tens of minutes or ended a game, clues some found too easy, and bottlenecks such as an occupied telephone box or locked park gates.

Blast Theory lists the work as the winner of the AHRB Innovation Award in 2005. It was nominated for the Net Art award at the 8th Annual Webby Awards in May 2004.

Research and legacy

From the London run, the ACE 2004 paper drew general design strategies for location-based and mixed reality performances: use real locations and implicate passers-by in the fiction, exploit ambiguity and the safe crossing of social boundaries, encourage social gameplay by giving players different but connected views of the world, and be realistic about positioning and networking. The authors deliberately aimed for "quite different, but connected, physical and virtual worlds, rather than a seamless augmented reality style overlay", and cited experimental augmented reality games from the research community, such as ARQuake and MIND-WARPING, as related work. They also proposed design changes for the online side, including proximity-based messaging and removing the online players' bird's-eye map view.

The work has continued to be studied outside the original team. Kate Adams examined in Body, Space & Technology (2006) how its "collision of virtual and real spaces" disrupts immersion and exposes habitual engagement with the digital interface. Matt Adams wrote a chapter on the work for the book Pervasive Games (2009), and Stuart Reeves analysed it in the chapter "Frames and Bystanders: Uncle Roy All Around You" in Designing Interfaces in Public Settings (2011). The MRL also lists a 2006 paper on the work's design and experience in Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Blast Theory says its later work Rider Spoke (2007), in which cyclists with handheld computers recorded messages at hiding places around a city, "developed from works such as Uncle Roy All Around You". The same 2018 retrospective describes the 2004 game I Like Frank as a project that, like Uncle Roy All Around You, tested "community and trust on digital platforms".

See also

• Can You See Me Now?
• Mixed Reality
• Reality-virtuality continuum
• Virtual world