Looking for a Good Time: Information Seeking in a Mobile Content Sharing and Gaming Environments

Indagator is a mobile application which incorporates multiplayer, pervasive gaming elements into content sharing. The application allows users to annotate physical locations with multimedia content (annotations), and concurrently, provide opportunities for play through creating and engaging interactive game elements, earning points, and socializing. This paper examines the motivations for accessing and viewing annotations in Indagator, and highlights the influence of introducing games to mobile content sharing applications in general. Participants used Indagator for one week and were thereafter interviewed. Results were drawn by triangulating data from the interview, server logs, and the content of the annotations accessed. Three overarching motivation categories for accessing annotations emerged from our analysis – Facts, Friends, and Fun. Further, participants generally felt that games would sustain their interest in accessing annotations in the long run. Implications of our work are also discussed.