The playeur and Pokémon Go: Examining the effects of locative play on spatiality and sociability

Evans, Leighton; Saker, Michael

doi:10.1177/2050157918798866

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In Pokémon GO, the observable activities and the crowds are often concentrated around locations called Gyms, Pokestops or the spawn locations of the Pokémon, which are all situated outdoors or public indoor spaces (Ishii et al 2016;Wang et al 2018). Players also tend to explore more outside their usual daily routes (Evans and Saker 2018). However, these game-specific locations can be accessed from indoors when they are close enough, and Pokémon can be lured to one's person using a digital item called incense.…”

Section: Playful Urban Space Where?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unblurring the boundary between daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games, visual online ethnography on Pokémon GO

Alavesa

2020

Behaviour & Information Technology

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Observing blending of realities, daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games is challenging. This study aims at observing this blending by targeting a vast number of images (N = 2432), which have been taken during gameplay of a well-known game, Pokémon GO. Images were collected from social media communities of Pokémon GO players in Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and analysed using visual and online ethnography. To keep the sample size manageable for analysis, the images were collected only from Nordic Pokémon GO player communities in eight cities during 2016-2018. The findings show that the blending of daily life and gameplay is observable from the shared photos especially from the augmented reality screenshots which is why in this article the context of gameplay, both outdoors and indoors, in Pokémon GO is described in more detail than in previous studies.

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Section: Playful Urban Space Where?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unblurring the boundary between daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games, visual online ethnography on Pokémon GO

Alavesa

2020

Behaviour & Information Technology

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“…Mobility, as a new paradigm in urban planning, geography and the social sciences more generally (Sheller & Urry, 2006), looks at how players of such games change their patterns of movement and practice of travel in urban space by interacting with the game. The effect of LBMGs on movement and mobility have also been discussed in the context of Pokémon Go (Evans & Saker, 2019;Gong, Hassink, & Maus, 2017).…”

Section: Hybrid Reality Games and The Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hybrid Space of Collaborative Location-Based Mobile Games and the City: A Case Study of Ingress

Sengupta

Tantoush

Bassanino

et al. 2020

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Structural changes in the way we live and interact in cities are occurring due to advances in mobile communication technologies affecting everyday practices. One such practice, at the forefront of digital technology adoption, is digital gaming or play. Location-based mobile games (LBMGs), such as Pokémon Go and Ingress have surged in popularity in recent years through their introduction of a new mode of play, employing mobile GPS and internet-enabled technology. Distinguished by their embedded GIS, LBMGs can influence how people play, interact with and perceive the city, by merging urban and virtual spaces into ‘hybrid realities.’ Despite the popularity of such games, studies into how LBMGs affect urban dweller interactions with each other and the city have been limited. This article examines how the digital interface of the large-scale collaborative LBMG Ingress affects how players experience and use the city. Ingress is a collaborative hybrid or location-based game that uses GPS location information from smartphones, Google maps, and Google POI to create virtual gameplay environments that correspond to and interact with other players and the city. The methodology cross-references the MDA framework from game studies (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) within the urban mobility, sociability and spatiality characteristics of the hybrid realities theoretical framework. In this article, we explore how Ingress (re)produces hybrid space through deliberate design of interface game elements. By applying this analytical approach, we identify the game mechanics and their role in producing a hybrid gameplay environment with impacts on social and mobility practices altering the perception of and engagement with the city.

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“…Scholarly work on Pokémon Go aligns with media discourse, generally concentrating on player motivations (see Zsila and Orosz, 2019; Alha et al, 2019), and the links between motivations, gameplay, and behavioral change (Kari et al, 2017), particularly in terms of health outcomes (Yang and Liu, 2017). Findings include positive correlations between play and physical activity (Althoff et al, 2016), increased social engagement in terms of forming new ties and strengthening existing ones (Vella et al, 2019), and accounts of how the mobilized intermingling of play and ordinary life leads to healthier bodies and social interactions (Evans and Saker, 2019). Hjorth and Richardson’s (2017) collection of short commentaries balances the pro-social and generative affordances of AR gameplay with a number of critical interventions, including how players use mobile interfaces to avoid social interaction (Humphreys, 2017); the corporate appropriation of public space (Sicart, 2017), surveillance and asymmetric visibility between players and Niantic (de Souza e Silva, 2017), and locative inequalities in physical space (Salen Tekinbaş, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Productive play: The shift from responsible consumption to responsible production

Whitson

French

2021

Journal of Consumer Culture

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Regulatory approaches to games are organized by boundaries between game/not-game, game/gambling game, skilled/unskilled play, consumption/production. Perhaps more importantly, moral justifications for regulating gambling (and condemning digital games) are rooted in the idea that they consume our time and wages but give little in return. This article uses two case studies to show how these boundaries and justifications are now perforated and reconfigured by digital mediation. The case study of Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) illustrates a contemporary challenge to rigid dichotomies between game/not game, skilled/unskilled play, and game/gambling game, demonstrating how regulation becomes deterritorialized as gambling moves out of state-regulated physical casinos and takes the form of networked, digital games. Our second case study of Pokémon Go approaches regulation from a different direction, complicating the rigid dichotomy between production/consumption in online networked play. We show how play is increasingly realized as productive in economic, social, physical, subjective and analytic registers, while at the same time, it is driven by gambling design imperatives, such as extending time-on-device. Pokémon Go exemplifies analytic productivity, a term we use to refer to the production of data flows that can be leveraged for a wide variety of purposes, including to predict, shape, and channel the behaviour of player populations, thereby generating multiple streams of revenue. Ultimately, both cases illustrate how digital games and gambling increasingly blur into each other, complicating the regulatory landscape.

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The playeur and Pokémon Go: Examining the effects of locative play on spatiality and sociability

Cited by 28 publications

References 23 publications

Unblurring the boundary between daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games, visual online ethnography on Pokémon GO

Unblurring the boundary between daily life and gameplay in location-based mobile games, visual online ethnography on Pokémon GO

The Hybrid Space of Collaborative Location-Based Mobile Games and the City: A Case Study of Ingress

Productive play: The shift from responsible consumption to responsible production

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