This article reviews findings from a survey of over 2, 000 Pokémon GO players regarding their motivations to play the game.  

Earlier experiences, especially with the same franchise, social influence, and popularity were the most common reasons to adopt the game, while progressing in the game was the most frequently reported reason to continue playing.  The player's personal situation outside the game and playability problems were the most significant reasons to quit the game.

The Pokémon GO brand is widely known, it has nostalgic value, and its characters are simple and attractive even if one is unfamiliar with them. The “gotta catch ‘em all” theme of Pokémon is well suited for a location-based game where the player can go to different places to find and catch different creatures.

Reasons to start playing Pokémon GO

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
As many as 43.9% of the respondents reported experience with fandom for similar types of games or hobbies as a reason to pick up the game. Out of these, experience with Pokémon was by far the most frequent reason to start playing, mentioned by 39.6% of the respondents. The idea of the game brought up nostalgic feelings of childhood moments playing Pokémon. Some dreamt of being a Pokémon trainer as a child, and the game felt as the closest thing to fulfill that dream. In a smaller margin were previous experiences with geocaching, Ingress (Niantic, 2013) or other location-based games, or playing games in general.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Parents mentioned either wanting to be more informed about their children's activities or wanting something common to do together with them. Similarly, a friend's or a partner's recommendations or wanting to spend time with them while playing were reported.

POPULARITY 
The hype around the game and the visibility of the players had a major effect

POSITIVE CHARACTERISTICS
Physical exercise and spending time outdoors while playing were appealing. In addition, the respondents liked the idea of being encouraged to explore their surroundings and new areas.

NOVEL TECHNOLOGY
Location-based characteristics or AR, was a reason to try the game.

SITUATION and CONVENIENCE
Wanting something fun to do while doing other less interesting activities, or having a conveniently located PokéStop nearby. Some mentioned having a new phone, which made trying the game out convenient. The game being free and good weather were also mentioned.

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE 
People stated they picked up the game because they wanted to keep up with the times.

SOCIAL FEATURES
The general sociability of the game, liking to compete or wanting to help others were brought up. Some felt that playing would be a good opportunity to meet new people, even potential partners.

GAME MECHANICS 
Looking for, hunting, and collecting Pokémon was fun. The “treasure hunt” like gameplay was seen as exciting.

THE NATURE OF THE GAME
Being casual enough and having easy access, was appealing.

Reasons to continue playing Pokémon GO

PROGRESSION  
The most common individual reason to keep on playing was collecting Pokémon.  Achieving personal goals, the joy of discovery, and the general feel of advancement.

POSITIVE ASPECTS
Again, exercise and outdoor activities interested the players, and having a reason to go out and walk was motivating.

SOCIAL FEATURES 
Whether wanting to meet new people while playing or playing together with friends or family. The game functioned as an easy way to connect people together and create a feel of community.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
This could mean parents wanting to be up to date and informed about their children's hobby or avoiding being left out of social circles when all friends were still playing the game.

INTEREST 
The game continued to feel interesting or fun.

FUTURE EXPECTATIONS 
Some players were curious about how the game was going to change or waiting for a specific update.

THE NATURE OF THE GAME 
The casual nature of the game, making it easy to play, while others felt that the challenging nature was positive. The game provided surprises and was rewarding.

While previous experiences, especially with the Pokémon brand, were brought up as the number one reason to start the game, they were rarely mentioned as the reason to continue playing.

Only a few respondents reported technology related reasons to continue playing, for instance liking the location-based properties or the AR features.

Reasons to stop playing Pokémon GO

SITUATION 
Getting bored, a lack of time or money, poor or cold weather, and health problems were mentioned, while some had quit due to their phone breaking or the game not working where they lived. Some had achieved their goal and had thus decided to quit, while others felt the hype was settling down.

PROGRESSION 
The leveling curve was seen to be too steep: the required experience points needed for a new level rose exponentially, while the earned experience points stayed the same, making it necessary to grind to advance. Similarly, when reaching a certain point in collecting the Pokémon, it became increasingly hard to find any new ones to advance towards the goal of catching them all.

FUNCTIONALITY PROBLEMS
Bugs, the game crashing or not registering the walked distances properly were mentioned. The respondents criticized the unequal gaming possibilities due to the Pokémon and PokéStops being concentrated to city centers. In addition, some disliked that you needed to keep the game active at all times even when playing passively. This caused the battery to drain.  

​SHALLOW
The shortcomings of the game, especially the lack of content, were seen to be problematic. Some players would have wanted more features or more Pokémon.

CHANGE
Sometimes players felt that the game was changing for the worse. For instance, the removal of the nearby feature, which had made locating Pokémon easier made some to stop playing.

BAD REPUTATION
Niantic was criticized for their lack of communication to the public, and even claims of not seeing them as trustworthy arose.

SOCIAL INFLUENCE
If friends no longer played the game, some respondents explained not feeling like continuing the game alone. Other people could have a negative influence, for instance by cheating.

Alha, K., Koskinen, E., Paavilainen, J. and Hamari, J., 2019. Why do people play location-based augmented reality games: A study on Pokémon GO. Computers in Human Behavior, 93, pp.114-122.

In this 2014 GDC Next panel presentation, ChoreMonster's Paul Armstrong and Alex Bowman, Ubooly's Carly Gloge, and THUP Games's Jim Nichols explain how to design useful, entertaining games and apps for children (and also not just for children).

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1.Build a brand
- A parent will look for something they recognise like an Elmo or Disney character.  They're also looking for something that isn't necessarily the stock standard mainstream, but familiarity helps.
2.Build a reputation
Often when parents browse apps they have an idea of what they're looking for, but they're actually looking for something that they've seen a kid play or heard about from another parent, something that’s been reviewed well.  
3.Features
Parents like applications to be both fun and educational (noting that this is all too often a check-box for apps, without real substance), as well as age-appropriate
4.Price carefully
Potential hidden payments send off alarm bells.  Parents prefer the full offering upfront.  This is tricky because you may need to release a freemium LITE version to build brand awareness, but you need to do a lot of research into the kinds of features people will pay for.
 
MISTAKES
Inconsistency…
e.g. following the Monkey preschool lunchbox app with a dress-up app…
it was really cute and had a lot of fun things for kids to do, but the parents didn't like it in general, because it was sort of a violation of the contract we had started with lunchbox, it wasn't educational, too much of a change too soon. The kids really liked it. But parents didn't – particularly not when they had the choice between a more overtly educational app versus one that was simply about play.
 
Insufficient observation…
During the first six months, we only watched children playing with our app once a month. Initially only a couple people would observe, but it became clear that developers were only loosely interpreting the results. When the entire team started watching the actual footage on a regular, fortnightly basis we found that they took it to heart when they saw something not work and would go fix it. This made our whole path a lot clearer.
 
Pricing…
Initially we thought we would offer subscriptions beside a limited free service, but we over-valued our offering.  We thought the limited service would inspire kids to ask for subscription. As it turned out parents got annoyed that we did not give their kids a good experience. We made assumptions without doing a lot of research. Again, we were just four people or three people, just working on small surveys that weren’t well rounded enough.
 
I've heard so many app developers say, Oh, we did a survey and people said they'd spend $6 a month on this…but I rarely ever see that play out. You need to look at the landscape of what people are willing to pay out there.  If you're in a marketplace, where everyone's offering it for free, you're not going to have any luck trying to offer it for a pay.  People generally won’t pay very much for children’s apps. … And BTW, often it turns out that main revenue generators (the people buying in-app purchases) are actually older audiences - which is a design challenge if you're making a children's app.

You're competing with a lot of like toy companies now and for them it's all about brand awareness. They're hoping that the kids will engage with the apps, they don't need to make any money on it. So you have to have a different strategy.
 
Originally, we sold coins for use in the app. It was actually Apple that pushed us away from that. They don't like the idea of kids kind of being consumers in games. So then we changed it, where now we sell educational packs to parents, and our conversion rate went from 2% to  8%.
 
Testing tips
- Don’t facilitate the play sessions – just watch how the kids engage with it through their own initiative. Don’t step in and touch the screen for the kid.
- You need someone to go in there that doesn't really have a lot of knowledge. Sometimes it's a parent, sometimes it's a play therapist that can help kids feel comfortable and won’t step in unless the kids were like really frustrated. If the parent is around, they're going to be protective, but that may also be realistic.
- If your app will be used at home, that's where you test.
- Rather than hire external research companies, it is generally better for the team to get in front of kids and watch them engage with the app.  Creators can’t rely on their own expectations, or intuitions as audiences often surprise creators.
 
 
How have audiences surprised you?
-I didn’t realise how much people hate reading…they skip over everything that explains how the app works …(so now) we keep it to one sentence…and keep everything flying through.
-I didn’t realise how protective a parent would be e.g. some parents refused to allow rewards in the app...educating them on the value of that reward became essential, like what the point values mean and how players gain points. There are so many things that we need to get across to a parent, but people are busy. (To counteract this these creators added a commanding voice-over at the start, followed by a fun and engaging question).
-At the same time children don't like to just sit around and wait to have something explained, so you have to design for the mechanics and play to be sort of obvious or intuitive for them.

How to be educational and entertaining, with creative pricing models.
 
-For school age children educational aspects are best kept optional and playful
 
-Education is already a kind of game-play for pre-school children so that can become core game design.
 
Design tips...
- Children often want to see things that look like they were drawn by a kid.
- Children will just touch and be like, oh, it does this. Do all you can to reward that.
- Children may also not have a lot of life experience, but they don’t like to experience themselves as being limited. They have an ego and they want to do things and so when they want to move into your game their expectation is that they're going to be able to do well in it and maybe they'll learn something for from it.
- So you always need to have hooks that allow them to move and be empowered and be able to experience the game. They can get stuck but the solution can reference back to something that might have already happened earlier in the game.

Design mistakes…
- Overly abstract or complex interfaces or interfaces that are just really complicated
- Over offering the core gameplay, like adding a bunch of bells and whistles that don't really have to do with the main experience so they become distracting.
- Remember, children like primary colours.  They can’t see the whole rainbow…so the tradition that everything has to be glossy and bevelled and shadowed and noise is not helpful in this context.  Neither are gimmicky fonts and typefaces.

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Future opportunities…
- Products that are integrated into a kid's life in a more organic way – to offset screen time, but also heighten the benefits of connectivity…something that has a lot of the sort of same sort of stickiness that TV used to have.
- Apps that graduate with kids… growing up with them and and kind of staying with them, so there’s brand allegiance and a lot of physical products.
- Engaging grandparents and extended family members. 40% of our customers were grandparents.  Grandparents are tech savvy, and they know their grandchildren are already playing with mobile devices.  They just don't know how to engage. So if you can create an opportunity, I think there's some interesting things you can do there.
- Channels…a bit like what's happening with Netflix, these channel opportunities offer a more holistic approach. Something's going to have to eventually break in with the individual app purchase world.

Armstrong, Paul, Alex Bowman, Carly Gloge, and Jim Nichols. 2014. DESIGNING APPS AND GAMES FOR KIDS (THE RIGHT WAY). edited by GDC. U.S.: YouTube.

This paper outlines audience research of early prototypes for mobile AR narrative games where users were invited to co-create a location based narrative using AR.

Noting that real world objects can stimulate user's imagination, the designer's created a system to encourage user's to create their own stories in relation to real sites.  Design guidelines included
1) menu minimisation, enabling users to jump directly into stories
2) carefully constrained user freedom
3) choice of interaction metaphors to support cross-space flow
4) encouraging joy by emphasising playful discovery

DISCOVERY
- In this mobile AR game design users could explore and uncover hidden parts of the story at random through their phone, which is utilized like a window to the physical world, enabling the discovery of narrativised AR objects.
- Only portions of the AR world can be viewed at any one time, forcing the user to construct the overall puzzle pieces in their head.
- Users werealso given the option to create their own stories by writing tags for these location linked AR objects.
- These tags could be shared and modified by other users in turn.

Following these principles the designers created 3 protoptypes
1) In the 1st prototype users could discover AR objects through a scrubbing and dusting action to mimic cleaning that also involved physical mobile vibrations whenever the phone is shaken to 'clean' the AR dirt.
2) The 2nd prototype involved users catching AR fish in prototype augmented ponds. Different ponds and fish were linked to different corresponding words and sentences, which users strung together through the act of fishing.  The image on the mobile viewfinder is simultaneously projected on a nearby large display. 
3) Users play with augmented comic strip graphics on the wall, adding their own captions and tags.

Results:
- Users regarded the 3rd prototype as the most interactive in terms of narrative creation
- The narrative interactivity of the 2nd prototype was less understood.
- Prototype 1 was regarded as the most playful  Even middle-aged users enjoying scrubbing themselves, despite weak flow between physical and virtual realms because participants only focused on dirt-scrubbing activity once the virtual body appeared on the mobile screen.

Nam, Y., 2015. Designing interactive narratives for mobile augmented reality. Cluster Computing, 18(1), pp.309-320.



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Summary:
In order to generate enough social buzz on the street to help build an audience, mobile augmented reality game designers should ensure that play is accessible, visibly different and ideally, social. 
 
Overview:
Santa’s Lil Helper (SLH), was a free mobile AR Christmas-themed treasure hunt application/event set up temporarily in a metropolitan area that failed to generate broad engagement due to a limited honeypot effect (HP involves the attractive lure of a crowd at play, visible popularity, fun and curious happenings in public and social contexts).  Whereas the honeypot effect (HP) is generally a useful contributor to the success of public technologies, by creating awareness, stimulating audience interest, and lowering social barriers to involvement the mobile application Santa’s Lil Helper impeded that effect because of:
1) a lack of presence of people in relation to the game and its interactive components
2) a lack of visibility of gameplay in urban space
3) lack of sharing options
 
SLH involved a treasure hunting-style task in which Santa had reportedly lost his mobile phone. Players had to help recover the phone by visiting six different locations within the city.  Users could visit the locations in any order they wished to complete the game. Each location was denoted by temporary physical markers, which served as triggers for AR content within the game. Five of the six sites contained markers that were four-sided columns approximately 1.85 metres in height. The sixth site had a marker that was implemented as a sign above a large red throne. 
 
The city council had commissioned the game and advertised it throughout the city.  Nevertheless, the game sites typically contained only a handful of people at any one time, so that no player crowds were visible to passers-by. 
 
LACK OF PRESENCE
The researchers suggest that perhaps the game was too widely distributed across all 6 sites, so that the number of people and time spent at each location was significantly limited (and HP would need to be regenerated at each site).  This dispersion also meant that there was less control of the interaction – which may be significant since the temporary disruption/redirection of the normal flow of urban movement and traffic can also generate interest. 
 
LACK OF VISIBILITY
At that time of year, the props blended in with all the other Christmas decorations and were easily lost/absorbed/rendered invisible amidst the bustling city streets.  People would often occupy those spaces for other activities, like sitting down.  Furthermore, the main action of the game was pointing a phone at the markers to view the AR, which is similar to the way that people use phones normally, so it was not clear to passers-by that participants were playing a game.
 
LACK OF SHARING
Given the action occurred on personal mobile screens, it was hard for passers-by to observe the AR.  Also, the application’s large file size meant that passers-by could not spontaneously download it and join in. 
 
DESIGN RECOMMENDATIONS

• The researchers recommend redesigning markers to more publicly convey interactivity and game-play e.g. turning them into dynamic beacons and environments that respond to interactions in publicly visual, auditory or sensory ways. 
• Unusual game-play movements are also recommended, such as performative movements that move the device through the air in search of an AR object. 
• It is worth considering that geo-located data can enable users to become aware of nearby, or past interactions by other players, or can indicate current hotspots of activity elsewhere …which also supports passive digital observation.
• Other shared experiences may involve collective access to a shared AR world, or public scoreboards, alongside options to visualize other player’s locations on screen in real time.
• Consider also allowing passers-by to manipulate the AR without needing to access a mobile device, such as by standing in the physical space between the target and the display, providing opportunities for collaboration and engagement
• Ensure that the app can easily be downloaded out and about – or, alternatively create a high profile lead up to this event that motivates a large enough number of users to pre-install the app at home.

 
n.b. As part of this study the researchers discovered that the offer of on-street mobile charging services encouraged longer, more personable and in-depth user interviews.

Kelly, R.M., Ferdous, H.S., Wouters, N. and Vetere, F., 2019, April. Can Mobile Augmented Reality Stimulate a Honeypot Effect?: Observations from Santa's Lil Helper. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 285). ACM.

This paper reports on 12 future focused participatory design workshops involving 216 young people, aged 9 to 16. Through a combination of hands on GPS enabled activities using locative and pervasive media young people explored their thoughts, feelings and wishes about the future. Initial activities included game-play and gifting actions (using treasure hunt geo-caching applications), GPS drawing and virtual tagging (using applications that track body movement as a line form in space), mapping activities, such as individual drawn and later combined group journey maps, and the emotional mapping of points of interest (using media rich interactive mapping applications).  These activities then inspired collaborative storytelling activities that imagined fantasy, or science-fiction stories about those journeys.  In addition after these initial activities, participants were shown a range of public and corporate produced future scenario imagining and planning videos and asked to either comment or redesign those activities to suit. 

Results:
The stories that participants imagined were influenced by the locations in which they were set.  Rural settings encouraged sporting, games and tourism themes, whilst stories in urban setting focused upon social interaction, security and territory. Girls were more interested in social networking and communications scenarios, particularly in relation to the ways that their popular culture knowledge of celebrities, popular local places and technology use interplays with issues of inclusion/exclusion from cliques. Boys tended to approach place in terms of territory.  They devised games of conquest and stealth, that also featured virtual graffiti as a form of territory claim.  Both genders like collecting play using mobile tools, but girls tended to collect celebrity culture knowledge, whilst boys imagine fantasy worlds to display weapons, power, or skills. Both genders talk about feeling excluded in public spaces and were attracted to the idea of secret signs and communications in these spaces that adults were not privy to. 

AIs were a universally popular way of interacting with the world.  Identity was seen to be fluid and AIs were imagined as masks that could be used to present a variety of different identities to the world.  Identity theft was an equal concern with participants supporting biometrics, smart ID and even embedded personal chips. Older groups were also concerned about equity and exclusion issues in terms of technology access. 

Imaginary future mobile devices (often described as wands in the young peoples’ imagined future scenarios) were designed around access, demand and control issues, prompting the researcher to comment that these future imagined mobile communications were not so much with others, as with the world itself.  Anywhere, anytime access that can also be personalised were central concerns.  AI were described as creatures, or beings.  Disguises and masks were referred to and the idea of personal invisibility was often explored.  A world of networked, smart domestic devices was approached as a magical realm, which the user can control like a scientific sorcerer.

Nolan, S., 2006. Building magical realms: responses to pervasive and locative media technology. Digital Creativity, 17(3), pp.185-192.

An edited book that is a companion publication to the 2018 Brazil exhibition of standout recent interactive and immersive factual narratives in different environments and across platforms.  


Introduction to interactive factuals:

The interactive format is linked to the emergence of web 2.0.  Influential works include _Gone Gitmo (2009) a participatory Guatanamo Bay Detention Center environment in Second Life, Highrise (2009 – 2017), a group of documentary projects about high-rise living noted for its aesthetic innovation (where site design became as informative as text and video) and it’s collaborative, perpetually in development over time production model.  Other notable projects include Alma: A Tale of Violence (2012) a mobile delivery documentary about the violence of Guatemalan street gangs; Snow Fall (2012), an interactive rich-media news report about an avalanche told through an exploration of the location through a choice of skier viewpoints, which also had a narrative path driven by a vertical scroll that inspired the term ‘scrollytelling’; Prison Valley (2010), a docu-game where you play as a prisoner; The Quipu Project (2015), a social impact participatory storytelling project about enforced sterilisation that allowed indigenous South Americans to record and upload their own stories by phone; Do Not Track (2015) a personalised web series about privacy and the data economy. Digital Me (2015) that creates a personalised reflective document of people’s hybrid online/offline identities. 
No format prevails, and hybrids proliferate. 
The Guardian and NYT are both active in this field, as are broadcasters BBC (England), RTVE (Spain), SBS (Australia), Arte (France) and The National Film Board Canada. 
Developmental breakthroughs include relatively cheap headsets, like the Oculus Rift, plus solutions to the challenge of motions sickness, and the emergence of cross-pollinating creative production hubs and festivals such as HotdocX (Montreal, Canada), idocs (Bristol, UK), the IDFA Doclab in Amsterdam, as well as the Tribeca Cinema 360 and Sundance Frontier Lab Festivals (U.S.).  The first production studios emerged out of these labs, along with the Interactive Documentary workshop (Switzerland).  The main distribution platforms for VR content are SteamVR, Oculus and Within. In Brazil, the first interactive documentaries emerged about 2010, are socially engaged and delivered across platforms. 

Immersive Narratives
The exhibition includes the 360 visual experience, Through The Masks of Luzia linked to a Cirque Du Soleil production which allow participants to experience becoming gigantic, as well as tiny; Dreams of O, which combined underwater and slow-motion 360 video; and the immersive VR manga, Tales of Wedding Rings.

The future?
Other formats will continue alongside VR/AR, so complementary streams of media are also likely to continue their importance.

• The duration and complexity of VR experiences is likely to increase. 
• The future status of VR (which offers simulations and interactions via a variety of sensory stimuli, mostly audio-visual) is uncertain because the sale of VR headsets is now going down, not up. 
• But AR is growing, along with emergence of mixed reality headsets. Gaudenzi predicts new works with can be consumed as either AR, or VR. 

Production tips 

1. Put the user at the centre of your creative process
2. Do your research and know what has already been done in the field, as well as where you are placed in terms of style and trends.
3. Embrace multi-disciplinary teams and iterative production
4. Consider co-creation with your subjects
5. Have a clear impact strategy e.g. user impact, social impact, social campaigns – and design action points accordingly
6. Ensure coherency by aligning platform, audience, impact, partners and resources

Paz, A., Gaudenzi, S., Salles, J., Maciel, K.A., Gifreu-Castells, A., Cruz, J. and De La Vega, X., 2019. BUG-Interactive and Immersive Narratives.

This article compares and contrasts the learning from two Blast Theory produced mobile mixed reality games in which online players, either play with, or against those on the street.  In the first game, Can You See Me Now? (CYSMN) which ran in late 2001 players were online, influencing professional performers on the street, and listening in as those performers ran about the streets trying to catch them.  On street performers spoke with each other in real time audio, whilst online players could only communicate via text. 

The second game Bystander, reversed this relationship, with players at large in urban settings.  In both games GPS, much less accurate than expected, with errors ranging from 4m to 106m.  In CYSMN this inaccuracy became an embedded knowledge strategy for the runners to exploit, placed on the ground as they were they more readily realised where it was accurate and therefore where they had more chance to catch the online players. 

Online players were less aware of these differences, relying more readily on their interpretation of the contextual sounds being broadcast in the runner’s audio streams.  In the 2nd game, Bystander, the performers were online collaborating with on street players to help them find a mysterious person whose name and picture they had only briefly been shown. 

The GPS inaccuracy was problematic, as performers were using it to help them advise the players where to go.  The production team had to adjust the design of the game to compensate by e.g. inserting a cross on screen at the point of the most recent GPS update, as well as a series of octagons to represent the field of potential error, but concluded that the change needed to be even more intrusive, and that future iterations should obscure part of the map to make that point even clearer.  As a result, audio became key, and online performer helpers would often ask players to describe what they saw. 

Beyond GPS inaccuracy and the need to expressly communicate that inaccuracy in the interface, the researchers concluded that other key challenges included ways to enrich the real time audio with more contextual knowledge such as time periods, and the historic stories associated with each place.

 
Flintham, M., Benford, S., Anastasi, R., Hemmings, T., Crabtree, A., Greenhalgh, C., Tandavanitj, N., Adams, M. and Row-Farr, J., 2003, April. Where on-line meets on the streets: experiences with mobile mixed reality games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 569-576). ACM.