Abstract

Location based mobile games have traditionally relied on implicit codes of conduct, legal ordinances, common social norms, or community emergent rules. However, these games are becoming increasingly popular and enforcing these implicit or explicit restrictions has become difficult. In this paper, we present a critical and systematic review of both commercial and non-commercial location based mobile games. We list selected characteristics of the games and highlight their connection to the affordances and restrictions on urban game arenas. We also demonstrate the feasibility of our characterization by applying it to two recent location based mobile games, Pokemon GO [53] and Street Art Gangs [4].