text: Pok 'emon Go has received unprecedented media coverage for a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques. The game has been commonly associated with greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and generally improving health, social, and security indices. However, the true impact of Pok 'emon Go on people's mobility patterns in a city is still largely unknown. In this paper we perform a natural experiment using data from mobile networks to evaluate the effect of Pok 'emon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago of Chile. We found a significant effect of Pok 'emon Go on the floating population of Santiago: up to 13.8 more people being outside at certain times, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects at specific times were found by performing several regressions using count models over snapshots of the cell phone network. The effect is significant after controlling for land use, daily patterns, and points of interest in the city. Particularly, we found that, in business days, there is more people on the street at commuting times, meaning that people did not change their daily routines but slightly adapted them to play the game. Conversely, on Saturday and Sunday night, people indeed went out to play to places nearby their homes. Even if the statistical effects of the game do not reflect the massive reach portrayed by the media, it still allowed the streets to become a new place for people to spend time in. This is important, because results like these are expected to inform long-term infrastructure investments by city officials, jointly with public policies aimed at, for example, stimulating pedestrian traffic or suggesting alternative routes. Our work supports the notion that location-based games like Pok 'emon Go have benefits for the life in the city.
  @cite_41: We describe two games in which online participants collaborated with mobile participants on the city streets. In the first, the players were online and professional performers were on the streets. The second reversed this relationship. Analysis of these experiences yields new insights into the nature of context. We show how context is more socially than technically constructed. We show how players exploited (and resolved conflicts between) multiple indications of context including GPS, GPS error, audio talk, ambient audio, timing, local knowledge and trust. We recommend not overly relying on GPS, extensively using audio, and extending interfaces to represent GPS error.
  @cite_1: Initially developed in Japan by Nintendo as a computer game, Pokemon swept the globe in the late 1990s. Based on a narrative in which a group of children capture, train, and do battle with over a hundred imaginary creatures, Pokemon quickly diversified into an array of popular products including comic books, a TV show, movies, trading cards, stickers, toys, and clothing. Pokemon eventually became the top grossing children's product of all time. Yet the phenomenon fizzled as quickly as it had ignited. By 2002, the Pokemon craze was mostly over. Pikachu’s Global Adventure describes the spectacular, complex, and unpredictable rise and fall of Pokemon in countries around the world. @PARASPLIT In analyzing the popularity of Pokemon, this innovative volume addresses core debates about the globalization of popular culture and about children’s consumption of mass-produced culture. Topics explored include the origins of Pokemon in Japan’s valorization of cuteness and traditions of insect collecting and anime; the efforts of Japanese producers and American marketers to localize it for foreign markets by muting its sex, violence, moral ambiguity, and general feeling of Japaneseness; debates about children’s vulnerability versus agency as consumers; and the contentious question of Pokemon’s educational value and place in school. The contributors include teachers as well as scholars from the fields of anthropology, media studies, sociology, and education. Tracking the reception of Pokemon in Japan, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Israel, they emphasize its significance as the first Japanese cultural product to enjoy substantial worldwide success and challenge western dominance in the global production and circulation of cultural goods. @PARASPLIT Contributors. Anne Allison, Linda-Renee Bloch, Helen Bromley, Gilles Brougere, David Buckingham, Koichi Iwabuchi, Hirofumi Katsuno, Dafna Lemish, Jeffrey Maret, Julian Sefton-Green, Joseph Tobin, Samuel Tobin, Rebekah Willet, Christine Yano
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  @cite_49: This article gives an introduction and overview of the field of pervasive gaming, an emerging genre in which traditional, real-world games are augmented with computing functionality, or, depending on the perspective, purely virtual computer entertainment is brought back to the real world.The field of pervasive games is diverse in the approaches and technologies used to create new and exciting gaming experiences that profit by the blend of real and virtual game elements. We explicitly look at the pervasive gaming sub-genres of smart toys, affective games, tabletop games, location-aware games, and augmented reality games, and discuss them in terms of their benefits and critical issues, as well as the relevant technology base.
  @cite_16: Historically, the play of digital games in public was restricted to certain locations such as arcades and cybercafes. The proliferation of personal, mobile, and digitally networked devices, however, has contributed to the ubiquity of digital games in contemporary culture, making them available for play anywhere, any time. This paper uses two examples to examine this recent shift to consider how play and digital games can contribute to revitalising the urban experience. The first examines the experience of playing digital games in urban cybercafes; and the second discusses the recent popular location–based gaming app for the iPhone, Shadow Cities . By contrasting the types of play that unfold in the situated but highly contingent environments of the cybercafe and the ‘hybrid’ space Shadow Cities’ massively multiplayer world, this paper argues that the historical role of play as the foundation for a vibrant and progressive city life is increasingly at stake in the shift towards pervasive, software–mediated gaming applications.
summary: Augmented Reality and Location-based Games The effects of augmented reality games and applications within the city have been anticipated for more than one decade @cite_41 @cite_49 . However, the limits in mainstream hardware have impeded their general implementation adoption at different times. Most studies about the impact of those games have been small-scale only @cite_24 . Even though smartphone technology has allowed location-based augmented reality games to become more commonplace in the last few years, until the launch of Pokémon Go, they still lacked the cultural impact needed to have a considerable effect on the city. As Frank Lantz is quoted in @cite_16 , in relation to the game PacManhattan: @cite_32 . Since as we discussed above, Pokémon is one of the most successful media franchises in the world @cite_1 , it enables the unique opportunity to study both, the impact of a location-based augmented reality game; and the effect of an intervention at the city scale when it comes to population mobility.