학술논문
The Geography of Pok\'emon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement
Document Type
Working Paper
Author
Source
Subject
Language
Abstract
The widespread popularity of Pok\'emon 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 Pok\'emon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pok\'emon 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 Pok\'emon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pok\'emon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pok\'emon 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 Pok\'emon GO may be counteracted.
Comment: This version of the paper contains a fix for a reference issue that appeared in the original version. Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017)
Comment: This version of the paper contains a fix for a reference issue that appeared in the original version. Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017)