Led by James Holston (Anthropology) and Greg Niemeyer (Art Practice & Berkeley Center for New Media), the Mobile City Chronicles (MCC) research team chronicled a contemporary city using mobile media. To chronicle the city, the research team constructed and playtested mobile "detection games" that engaged new systems of monitoring urban life. These games related online data to local real-world experiences through locative media (cell phones, GPS, laptops).

The online data came from new surveillance technologies that monitor behavior in cities. Examples include 911 calls, ER triage accounts, and pharmaceutical sales—all data that reflect changes in the distribution of health-seeking behavior. The research team also used websites that track public safety, criminal activity, financial transactions, and dating activities. In their games, cell phones acted as interfaces not only for reading from such databases but also for writing to them.

The chronicling of data, agency and space produces predictive social networks in the areas of crime, health, dating, real estate, and finance. In real terms, such chronicles become the basis, often under the rubric of security, of government intervention and policy. Thus, the research team analyzed and exposed the new kinds of profiling on which, worldwide, states, corporations, and inhabitants increasingly rely to understand and exploit one another.

The goal of the MCC team was to develop games to expose and manipulate the premises of such surveillance chronicles and to produce alternatives. These detective games were played on a mobile computer interface such as a smart phone or laptop. Through alternative quests, the games produced new data about cities that reveal previously undetected patterns, expanding the notion of urban ethnography.

Meeting in the spring of 2010, the research team designed and playtested diverse game ideas and develop game specifications for longer-term game design projects.