Conquering the city: understanding perceptions of mobility and human territoriality in location-based mobile games

Papangelis, Konstantinos; Metzger, Melvin; Sheng, Yiyeng; Liang, Hai-Ning; Chamberlain, Alan; Cao, Ting

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of mobile video games, game designers and developers are starting to integrate geolocation into video games. Popular location-based games such as Ingress or Pokémon Go have millions of users, yet little is known about how the use of such games influences the nature of a user’s interaction with other users and their physical surroundings. To investigate how location-based games are integrated into a player’s daily life, how they influence a player’s mobility through the city, their perception of places and the role of human territoriality in this context, we have developed a location-based mobile multiplayer game called CityConqueror. In this paper, we present CityConqueror and the results of a study, which has focused on participants playing the game over a period of two weeks. The findings show that location-based games can be designed to give the player the illusion of playing in the context of the “real” world rather than a virtual or hybrid game reality. Our findings also suggest that location-based games can have a strong influence on a player’s mobility and perception of urban space and that human territoriality can be expressed through location-based games. Based on our findings we propose a series of design implications for the design of mobile location-based games.

Citation

Papangelis, K., Metzger, M., Sheng, Y., Liang, H., Chamberlain, A., & Cao, T. (2017). Conquering the city: understanding perceptions of mobility and human territoriality in location-based mobile games. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 1(3), https://doi.org/10.1145/3130955

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 7, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Sep 19, 2017
• Publication Date: Sep 19, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 5, 2018
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 3
• Article Number: 90
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3130955
• Public URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3130955
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3139486.3130955