Territorial or nomadic? Geo-social determinants of location-based IT use: a study in Pokémon GO

Abstract

PurposeLocation-based games (LBGs) have afforded novel information technology (IT) developments in how people interact with the physical world. Namely, LBGs have spurred a wave of territoriality (i.e. controlling) and exploration (i.e. discovering) of augmented physical space that are driven by different social dynamics related to group formation, social connectivity and altruism. The aim of this study is to investigate this dynamic and how it is further related to the use intensity of location-based IT.Design/methodology/approachThis work presents a structural equation model that connects social dimensions of play to territorial control and exploration, and playing intensity. The model was tested with sychometric data gathered from a global sample of Pokémon GO players (N = 515).FindingsIn the tested sample, players' social self-efficacy and altruism were positively associated with team identification. Team identification, in turn, was positively associated with both territorial control and exploration tendency. Territorial control had a significant relationship with playing intensity; however, exploration tendency did not. This implies territorial control is the stronger predictor of playing intensity.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that human primal urges to conquer and control geographical territory may surface in the digital reimagination of physical space. LBGs offer opportunities for making use of new forms of play (territorial control and exploration) in motivating locative behaviours.Originality/valueThis research quantifies the relationships between a social predisposition, team identification, territorial control, exploration tendency and playing intensity in the context of Pokémon GO. It contributes new knowledge to the understanding of territorial behaviour (control and exploration) in location-based IT.

Friend-connecting affordances: playing online games to contact friends

“…R 2 ) of our endogenous constructs, with a magnitude ranging from 30% to 34%. The explained variance is consistent with past studies (Laato et al, 2022;Yang and Gong, 2021) and reflects large effect sizes (Cohen, 1992).…”

“…Post-hoc analyses Comparison between RTS/MMORPG and all other game genres for friend-connecting affordances. To offer enhanced insights, we followed the literature to conduct post hoc analyses (Huang and Zhou, 2021;Laato et al, 2022;Yang and Gong, 2021). Specifically, we compared friend-connecting affordances among different game genres.…”

Introduction to the Minitrack on Decision Support for Healthcare Processes and Services

“…We define LBGs as mobile games where the players' physical location matches their avatar's location on a map, and where movement in the game world consequently occurs by moving in the real world. Despite being around since the beginning of the 2000s (Leorke, 2019), LBGs saw a massive spike in popularity with the release of Pokémon GO in summer 2016 (Hamari et al, 2019;Laato, Kordyaka, et al, 2022). The popularity of Pokémon GO was quickly followed by other commercial LBGs from popular franchises such as NextGames' The Walking Dead: Our World, Ludia's Jurassic World: Alive and Spokko's The Witcher: Monster Slayer.…”

“…These developments suggest the presence of both industry and academia attention on motivational information systems (IS) (Hamari et al, 2014;Koivisto and Hamari, 2019) for promoting forest-going. One crucial technology in this field are location-based games (LBGs), which are played out in the real world and influence players' real world mobility (Laato, Kordyaka, et al, 2022). However, there is a dearth of evidence on how LBGs and other similar information systems influence and shape players' perceptions of nature.…”

What constitutes victims of toxicity - identifying drivers of toxic victimhood in multiplayer online battle arena games

“…Fourth, we only looked at a specific game genre not including a wide variety of video games, which was intended to avoid potential confounds. However, we strongly recommend to test the insights of our study in neighboring (multiplayer) game genres such as location-based games that provide a rich and connectable portfolio of current research work (Laato et al, 2021(Laato et al, , 2022. Fifth, as part of our study, we only included the biological sex of participants to control for potential confounds (Kordyaka and Brunnhofer, 2021).…”