Impact of location-based games on phone usage and movement: a case study on Pokémon GO

Abstract

Pokémon GO was a short lived mobile location-based gaming phenomenon. After its launch in July 2016, it quickly reached 500 million installs, but afterwards interest faded. As part of a large scale "in the wild" mobile phone study we have recorded phone usage and location measurements between June and September 2016. We investigate who were the people who installed and played Pokémon GO and what effects it had on their behaviour. We chose as a middle point the start of playing the game, and selected users that had activity for at least two weeks before and two weeks after it. In this work we present our findings on a sample of 2, 861 users. We compare demographic characteristics and Big Five personality traits of these users with 7, 904 non-playing users from the same time period. The general daily phone usage of players increased on average by 27 minutes, which represents 16% per day. In terms of large scale movement patterns, these did not change, with regard to diameter and total path length per day.