This week I read an article about location based mobile games. Location based mobile games are games that are played by moving around in your real life physical environment. One of the most popular examples of this is Pokemon go. The article also talked about how mobile applications like Foursquare use elements of location based mobile games.
Gamification is when a service uses elements of games for services that are not considered games. This can be beneficial for the app developer because it makes the app more addictive, and it makes people keep coming back to use the app or service.
Foursquare is a location based service. It lets users share their locations with friends, and it is a form of social network. Foursquare was an early adopter of using gamification to make their app more successful. Foursquare uses badges and other rewards for going to places in real life. In that way, Foursquare encourages interaction with real life places as a part of their app.
The article also defines hybrid spaces as spaces that merge online interactions and in person interactions. This changes how we interact with real life spaces by changing the context of our digital presence within a space. For example, Snapchat has a location tracking feature where you can see the location of all your friends that have the location turned on. This could change how you interact with the physical environment because you might not go to a certain place if you don’t want people seeing where you’re at.
One quote that helped me understand the concept better was “The ways in which information shifts as one moves from location to location is one of the key elements that change when the spaces people move through become hybrid spaces”. What this means is that when using a location based service, the location based service will change its content based on where you are. This could also change how you interact with your environment. For example, it could suggest a place for you to visit if you were close to it.
These changes in how you interact with your environment can be dangerous to the user in some cases. I remember when Pokemon Go came out, and there were news stories about people not being aware of their environments and getting hurt, lost or even killed while playing Pokemon Go. Personally, I got outside a lot more than I normally would have and I went to a lot of different places that I wouldn't have normally gone if it weren’t for Pokemon Go. For example, my family went camping together when Pokemon Go was really popular.
In the game, there are physical locations that you can go to to collect materials virtually. There was only one of those locations near our campsite so we walked there. It was next to a post office. We stayed there for several hours, and we never would have gone there if it weren’t for the game. There was also a group of several other people that came and went while we were there.
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