Abstract
Pokémon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for 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 Pokémon 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 phone networks to evaluate the effect of Pokémon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago, capital of Chile. We found significant effects of the game on the floating population of Santiago compared to movement prior to the game’s release in August 2016: in the following week, up to 13.8% more people spent time outside at certain times of the day, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects were found by performing regressions using count models over the states of the cellphone network during each day under study. The models used controlled for land use, daily patterns, and points of interest in the city.Our results indicate that, on business days, there are 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, but favored places close to where they live.Even if the statistical effects of the game do not reflect the massive change in mobility behavior portrayed by the media, at least in terms of expanse, they do show how ‘the street’ may become a new place of leisure. This change should have an impact on long-term infrastructure investment by city officials, and on the drafting of public policies aimed at stimulating pedestrian traffic.
Highlights
Pokémon Go is a location-based mobile game about capturing and ‘evolving’ virtual characters that appear to exists in the same real-world location as players
The general perception is that games like Pokémon Go and its predecessor, Ingress [ ], could make whole populations change their mobility patterns through a reward-system: earning more points by catching creatures, getting to certain places and checking in, among other well-known gamification techniques
We followed a natural experiment approach whereby we evaluated floating population patterns at two specific intervals of time: seven days before and seven days after the launch of Pokémon Go
Summary
Pokémon Go is a location-based mobile game about capturing and ‘evolving’ virtual characters that appear to exists in the same real-world location as players As soon as it came out, people of all ages seemed to be caught in the frenzy of walking everywhere trying to find the pocket monster. Ingress and Pokémon Go have a laxer definition of ‘check-points’ than a city’s usual Points of Interest (POIs, such as museums and parks) including, for example, graffiti [ ] and hidden heritage [ ] These games may help motivate visiting different kinds of places from the usual POIs. Because people tend to visit few POIs in their daily routines [ ], playing the game implies that people would tend to visit different places from those they would usually visit. If this is the case, and considering that Pokémon is one of the most successful media franchises in the world [ ], providing empirical evidence in favor (or against) this folk hypothesis would help understand the level to which these games make people change their habits
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