Adaptive Locations

1. Overview

Name

• Popular Name: Adaptive Locations
• Alternative Names: Alternative routing

Intent

To distribute footfall of people in such a way as to prevent oversaturation of single areas and protect individual spaces.

Operation: Navigation Pattern

Underlying Principle: Diffusion of people

Strength of Evidence: Tested on site (Ages of Avebury)

2. Target

Problem

A system with a predefined path and locations would cause many people to follow the same path, potentially causing erosion, disrupting the site/visitors that are not participating, and overcrowding around key locations.

Context

• Situation: The user is holding a device, and has to go to a new location – the location needs to be chosen as to help with the distribution of footfall and dispersion, and the user needs a way to be able to tell the system if the chosen location is unreachable.
• Environment: A space with multiple possible paths.

Forces

The success of the pattern depends on:

• The number of locations available for each node (more is better)
• The openness of the space
• The availability of each location
• The affordances and the complexity of the navigational system
• The complexity of the local topology

Consequences

Weaknesses:

• W1: The application could pick a location that is unreachable
• W2: When designing, sometimes there are no alternate locations, so you either have to funnel everyone through a single location, or pick a close one (might not fit as much)
• W3: All locations for a node could be unreachable
• W4: If in a group with multiple people playing the game on different devices, the challenge to keep people in sync will inadvertently lead to location mismatch at points

Strengths:

• S1: Compared to a single path experience, the players are given different locations for each node, adding variety
• S2: Can be more robust with redundancy added
• S3: Convenience of choice location
• S4: Diffuses visitors, helps with erosion, and does crowd management

3. Application

Solution: An system that lets you anchor one node to multiple locations, and a mechanism that selects that location at runtime

Sensitizer: A map of the Avebury Henge Site, with example arrows for paths that people can take, and node locations for each story beat (each node has two possible locations)

Participants: Designed for a single participant or a shared experience.

Breakdown:

Variations:

Rationale

Makes users disperse and collectively manages the individual experience as a whole on the site.

Implementation Details

Suggestions:

Issues:

Pitfalls:

Impact on Immersion

Overview: This design pattern can separate you from a busy path, helping you not being disrupted by other players and non-players

Ludic Considerations

• One can let the user’s location choices be a mechanic in the game, rather than part of the narrative.

Example

Known Uses: Ages of Avebury (2025) uses the system as part of the Modern period navigation, where people are navigating to different locations, and there is a possibility that it’s closed off due to weather, or just unreachable due to other circumstances. There are two locations for each node, and one is chosen randomly – if unreachable, people can try the other location, and if that is unreachable, then they can skip the location altogether.

Links

• https://github.com/LoGaCulture/Ages-of-Avebury
• https://github.com/LoGaCulture/Ages-of-Avebury/blob/main/Assets/Code/Scripts/LocationRandomiser.cs
• https://github.com/LoGaCulture/LUTE

4. Supplementary Information

Version History

v0.5 (19/03/2026): Initial draft
v1.0 (23/03/2026): Finalised first version