Pokémon GO is not an isolated success story either with other location-based games, such as Zombies, Run!, Ingress, Geocaching, Minecraft Earth and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite similarly being highly popular.Ĭurrent research understanding suggests that location-based games, and related applications, can have a sustained effect on mobility. Pokémon GO remains among the most popular mobile apps in many countries, it has over 100 million active users, and has been downloaded over billion times in total. We study mobility changes in response to location-based gaming through Pokémon GO, the best known, and one of the most popular examples of location-based games.

In this article, we focus on location-based games due to their immense popularity and their use of gamification, which has been shown to be among the most effective mechanisms for achieving sustained change in mobility. Other examples of applications in this category include varied location-based services, online location-based social networks and smartphone and wearable applications for physical activity. More generally, location-based games are examples of a broader class of smartphone applications that attempt to promote physical activity-either directly through recommendations or indirectly through objectives that are linked with physical locations. From a scientific standpoint, the most unique and interesting aspect of these games is how they encourage and promote movement, which can improve physical and mental health, and be comparable to a health or a fitness app. Location-based gaming has steadily emerged as a popular pastime on smartphones, and become a potentially effective way at promoting physical activity. Our results thus suggest that intra-individual variations resulting from location-based gaming can be captured by re-parameterization of existing mobility models. Our analysis shows that location-based games, such as PokémonGO, increase mobility-in line with previous findings-but the characteristics governing mobility remain consistent with a truncated Lévy-flight model and that the increase can be explained by a larger number of short-hops, i.e., individuals explore their local neighborhoods more thoroughly instead of actively visiting new areas. We analyse the mobility changes considering the popular PokémonGO application as a representative example of location-based games and study two datasets with different reporting granularity, one captured through location-based social media, and the other through smartphone application logging. In this article, we study the mobility laws of location-based gaming-an emerging and increasingly popular exogenous factor influencing personal mobility. Understanding these variations is essential for improving our collective understanding of human mobility, and the factors governing it. Indeed, empirical studies have shown that the aggregate behaviour of individuals follows a truncated Lévy-flight model, but little understanding exists of the laws that govern intra-individual variations in mobility resulting from transportation choices, social interactions, and exogenous factors such as location-based mobile applications.

Currently, factors governing variations in personal mobility are understudied with existing research focusing on explaining the aggregate behaviour of individuals. This pervasiveness of mobility makes it paramount to understand factors that govern human movement and how it varies across individuals. Mobility is a fundamental characteristic of human society that shapes various aspects of our everyday interactions.

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