Turning life into a game: Foursquare, gamification, and personal mobility

Abstract

Location-based mobile games (LBMGs) are games that people play while moving through physical spaces. Research has shown that they can impact individuals’ experience of their surrounding space and their mobility decisions. Extending that research, this article looks at the gaming elements of the location-based social network (LBSN) Foursquare, analyzing how Foursquare’s gaming elements can impact people’s mobility decisions. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews, the goal of this study is to draw from the concepts of hybrid space, spatial legibility, and gamification to show how Foursquare’s gaming elements can add a playful layer to physical spaces and discuss the impacts of the application designers’ goal of turning “life into a game.”

“The Sugar’d Game before Thee”: Gamification Revisited

“…9 Because users frequently and deeply interact with Foursquare, it quickly became both an advertising platform and a source of marketing data, despite having fewer users than other social networks. 10 Foursquare's developers eventually focused on its non-gamified features, spinning off the system of points, badges, and titles into a companion app called Swarm, a move that upset some users.…”

From hybrid space to dislocated space: Mobile virtual reality and a third stage of mobile media theory

“…The information once received, whether alerts about friends' check-ins, mapping directions to a bar, or nearby historical sites on a tourist app, was about one's physical surroundings. Equally important, that information then influenced mobility patterns, a point repeated in mobile media research on a variety of topics, including mapping applications (Ozkul, 2015), mobile gaming (Frith, 2013), and location-based social networking (Saker and Evans, 2016). Rather than a tool of physical disengagement, the smartphone as locative media instead became an interface through which to engage in an augmented way with nearby physical space.…”

“…that enabled people to 'check-in' to share location with friends (Saker and Evans, 2016), and mobile games that used location information for gameplay (Frith, 2013;Licoppe and Inada, 2006). By 2018, it has become nearly impossible to even begin listing applications-or even types of applicationsthat use location to tailor information (Wilken and Goggin, 2015).…”

Understanding Yik Yak: Location-based sociability and the communication of place

“…As a result of its popularity, Foursquare has been the subject of much research. The application has been examined in the context of modifying approaches to mobility (Frith, 2013), sociability (Bertel, 2013;Silva and Frith, 2010;Frith, 2014;Licoppe, 2014), place Humphreys and Liao, 2013;Ozkul, 2013), and gamification (Frith, 2013;Saker and Evans, 2016b).…”