Title: Towards an Understanding of the Effects of Augmented Reality Games on Disaster Management,
Abstract: Location-based augmented reality games have entered the mainstream with the
nearly overnight success of Niantic's Pokémon Go. Unlike traditional video
games, the fact that players of such games carry out actions in the external,
physical world to accomplish in-game objectives means that the large-scale
adoption of such games motivate people, en masse, to do things and go places
they would not have otherwise done in unprecedented ways. The social
implications of such mass-mobilisation of individual players are, in general,
difficult to anticipate or characterise, even for the short-term. In this work,
we focus on disaster relief, and the short- and long-term implications that a
proliferation of AR games like Pokémon Go, may have in disaster-prone regions
of the world. We take a distributed cognition approach and focus on one natural
disaster-prone region of New Zealand, the city of Wellington.