Understanding the Effects of Augmented Reality Games on Disaster Management
Even though the initial hype around Pokémon Go has died down, it has demonstrated that it is important to understand this new crossroad between the real and the virtual world. In the paper titled “Towards an Understanding of the Effects of Augmented Reality Games on Disaster Management” I discuss various implication of location-based augmented reality games on disaster response, which raises important questions for policy makers and the general public.
Abstract: Location-based augmented reality games have entered the mainstream with the nearly overnight success of Niantic’s Pokémon Go. Unlike traditional video games, the fact that players of such games carry out actions in the external, physical world to accomplish in-game objectives means that the large-scale adoption of such games motivate people, en masse, to do things and go places they would not have otherwise done in unprecedented ways. The social implications of such mass-mobilisation of individual players are, in general, difficult to anticipate or characterise, even for the short-term. In this work, we focus on disaster relief, and the short- and long-term implications that a proliferation of AR games like Pokémon Go, may have in disaster-prone regions of the world. We take a distributed cognition approach and focus on one natural disaster-prone region of New Zealand, the city of Wellington.
Luczak-Roesch, M., 2017. Towards an Understanding of the Effects of Augmented Reality Games on Disaster Management. arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.06610.
