Paper Info
Title
The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement.
Abstract
The widespread popularity of Pokémon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokémon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokémon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokémon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokémon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokémon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokémon GO may be counteracted.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3025453.3025495
CHI
Keywords
Field
DocType
Location-based games, geography, Pokemon GO, augmented reality, algorithmic bias, GeoHCI
Data science,Field survey,Simulation,Computer science,Popularity,Augmented reality,Human–computer interaction
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017)
6
0.49
References 
Authors
9
13
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ashley Colley124541.59
Jacob Thebault-Spieker2916.49
Allen Yilun Lin361.16
Donald Degraen4202.26
Benjamin Fischman560.49
Jonna Häkkilä6893103.11
Kate Kuehl760.49
Valentina Nisi816036.54
Nuno Jardim Nunes942574.01
Nina Wenig1072.19
Dirk Wenig117312.57
Brent Hecht12111773.88
Johannes Schöning13114587.96