The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement
This research addresses the impact of location-based gaming on real-world geography and mobility, offering insights for designing future systems to mitigate biases, though it is incremental in building on prior geographic studies.
The study examined the geographic effects of Pokémon GO on places and movement, finding that the game reinforces existing biases favoring urban and less diverse areas, potentially shifts global mobility patterns, and introduces geographically-linked safety risks.
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.