Understanding Social Interactions in Location-based Games as Hybrid Spaces: Coordination and Collaboration in Raiding in Pokémon GO

要旨

The overlaying of physical spaces with digital information produces hybrid spaces, redefining people’s experience of social interactions. Location-based games (LBGs) with social components are a good case. Yet, the impact LBGs have on sociability remains under-researched. In April 2020, the new in-person/remote raiding format in the LBG Pokémon GO provided a lens to explore people’s social interactions in hybrid spaces. We interviewed 41 Pokémon GO players to understand how players coordinate and collaborate for in-person/remote raids and other social patterns. Our findings demonstrate that new social dynamics occurred: participants’ social interactions highly rely on external social media groups bridging cyberspace and the physical world. In such external social media groups, spontaneously formed leadership roles and mentor-mentee relationships demonstrate autonomy among players in the hybrid space. However, we observed that the interoperability issue challenges people’s experience. Overall, this work sheds light on the social interactions in LBGs as hybrid spaces.

著者
Jiangnan Xu
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
Konstantinos Papangelis
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
John Dunham
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
Cati Boulanger
Niantic Inc., San Francisco, California, United States
Jin Ha Lee
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, United States
Nicolas LaLone
University of Nebraska at Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Michael Saker
City University London, London, United Kingdom
論文URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581544

動画

会議: CHI 2023

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)

セッション: Social and Eduation in Games

Hall G2
6 件の発表
2023-04-25 18:00:00
2023-04-25 19:30:00