Playing with the Stones: The New Locative Games at Avebury

 Avebury has always been a place that rewards slow looking. The scale of the bank and ditch, the awkward tilt of individual sarsens, the way the landscape folds around the circle — these things reveal themselves gradually. Yet for many visitors the experience can still feel static: walk, look, read a panel, move on. In 2025 a group of researchers and designers tried a different approach. They turned the monument into a series of short, location-aware smartphone games.

The result is an anthology of roughly twenty free apps collectively known as the Avebury Adventures (or the Avebury Anthology). They form part of the larger European research project LoGaCulture — Locative Games for Cultural Heritage — run by Bournemouth University, the University of Southampton and the National Trust, with funding from the EU Horizon programme and UK Research and Innovation.

What the games actually do

Most of the apps use the phone’s GPS so that content appears only when you are standing in a particular place. Some add augmented reality, so virtual objects or characters sit on top of the real stones through the camera. Others are simpler narrative or puzzle experiences that unfold as you walk.

Examples include:

• Ages of Avebury (University of Southampton) — you take the role of a surveyor searching for missing stones and uncover the story of a disappearing archaeologist, with an AR reconstruction of a complete circle.
• Henge Hunts — follow trails and “hunt” the giant cattle, bears and wolves that once lived in the Neolithic landscape.
• Replicas, Uncovering Avebury, Avebury Research Challenge — more archaeological in flavour, involving collecting fragments, helping a fictional Professor Stone, or digging up knowledge around the stones.
• Lighter or more playful titles such as Don’t Harm the Sheep!, Journey Home (aimed at children), and even a cyberpunk-themed cyber@avebury.

There are also creative experiences where you collect stickers or visual elements to design your own Avebury postcard, and a couple of titles that can be partly experienced away from the site.

The games launched with QR-code boards in the visitor barn in late July 2025. Many remain available on both major app stores.

The thinking behind it

Locative games sit at the intersection of several research strands. First is the long-standing question of how people develop a sense of place and presence at heritage sites. Traditional interpretation often treats the visitor as a passive recipient of information. Locative and mixed-reality experiences try to make the visitor an active participant whose physical movement through the landscape drives the narrative.

Researchers in this field talk about “entanglement” — the idea that the digital layer, the physical stones, the visitor’s body and the stories become interwoven rather than sitting side by side. One of the 2026 papers from the project, The Relational Entanglement Diary, even proposes a method for evaluating these multi-layered experiences.

There is also a practical research question: can playful interaction increase engagement, especially among younger visitors or those who find conventional interpretation dry, without trivialising the archaeology? Early results from the Avebury trials suggest many people stay longer, notice details they would otherwise have missed, and report a stronger emotional connection to the site. Whether that translates into deeper historical understanding is harder to measure and remains an open question the academic papers are still exploring.

The technical side draws on earlier work in hypertext narrative, location-based storytelling systems, and the design of authoring tools that let writers and artists create these experiences without needing to be programmers. The Bournemouth team in particular developed frameworks (including the LUTE toolkit) to make locative game creation more accessible.

Where to find them

The simplest way to browse the Android versions is the Google Play search the project itself recommends:

https://play.google.com/store/search?q=avebury&c=apps

On iOS, search the App Store for “Avebury” together with titles such as Replicas, Henge Hunts, Ages of Avebury or cyber@avebury. Most of the apps are credited to LoGaCulture / Bournemouth University or the University of Southampton.

The central project site is https://logaculture.eu/. It contains background on the wider research, design patterns, and links to the games and related tools.

Key people involved include Dr Charlie Hargood (Bournemouth University, games technology), Professor David Millard (University of Southampton), and Dr Ros Cleal (National Trust curator at Avebury).

The academic papers

Two papers presented at the 2026 ACM Creativity & Cognition conference discuss the Avebury work in more formal terms:

• In Search of Lost Times: Reimagining Mixed Reality for an Ancient Site (Rimington, Baker, Blount, Jones, Jordan, Malinov & Millard) — DOI: 10.1145/3803784.3809283
• The Relational Entanglement Diary: A Novel Method for Evaluating Entangled Transmedia Engagement (Ferreira et al.) — DOI: 10.1145/3803784.3809275

They are written for a specialist audience and use the dense theoretical language common in interaction design research. The practical outcome — the apps themselves — is more approachable.