What is it about?
Location-based mobile games, such as Pokémon GO or Geocaching, have millions of players distributed globally. Most of the gameplay takes place on the streets of cities where people and technological infrastructure are more abundant. The gameplay and the games augment the players' daily lives in various ways and with a gradient that may vary from experience to experience. In this paper, we reviewed and played various location-based games (30) to characterize the gameplay. How games allow freedom of movement, facilitate player-player interactions, and interactions with the game environment vary. We noticed the biggest differences between commercial and noncommercial games. The former can be global and ongoing, while many smaller-scale noncommercial games, on the other hand, allow more interaction between players.
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Why is it important?
This characterization helps to understand with detailed examples how gameplay experiences in urban environments are shaped and orchestrated by the game developers of location-based mobile games. The characterization helps understand the urban environment as a game arena but can also be beneficial when designing new games or events for this environment.
Perspectives
The characterization not only helps to understand the games and the game environment. Smart phones have been the dominant mobile interface to digital and virtual words till now, but this may change in near future. There is a wide selection of mobile devices currently available such as mobile virtual or augmented reality headsets, wearables and smart glasses. Understanding the urban environment as a hybrid game arena can help see new potential for these technologies that might be our future interfaces to the evergrowing digital landscapes of the Metaverse.
Paula Alavesa
University of Oulu
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Anarchy or Order on the Streets, October 2017, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3116595.3116614.
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