Designing location-based mobile games with a purpose: collecting geospatial data with CityExplorer

The games with a purpose paradigm proposed by Luis von Ahn [9] is a new approach for game design where useful but boring tasks, like labeling a random image found in the web, are packed within a game to make them entertaining. But there are not only large numbers of internet users that can be used as voluntary data producers but legions of mobile device owners, too. In this paper we describe the design of a location-based mobile game with a purpose: CityExplorer. The purpose of this game is to produce geospatial data that is useful for non-gaming applications like a location-based service. From the analysis of four use case studies of CityExplorer we report that such a purposeful game is entertaining and can produce rich geospatial data collections. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.8 [Personal Computing]: General--Games General Terms Design

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACMACE
• Authors: Sebastian Matyas, Christian Matyas, Christoph Schlieder, Peter Kiefer, Hiroko Mitarai, Maiko Kamata
• Keywords: ACMACE 2008, Game, Geospatial Data, Human Computer Interaction, Location-based Mobile Game