Analysis of the Quality of Points of Interest in the Most Popular Location-based Games

Location-basedgames (LBGs) have risen to popularity recently with games like Pokémon GO, Jurassic World: Alive and Walking Dead: Our World. The games revolve around travelling to points of interests (PoIs) to perform missions, but where the points are located and what they represent in the real world varies between games. In this study, we look at the PoI placements in five popular LBGs for Android and iOS platforms: Pokémon GO, Ingress, Jurassic World: Alive, The Walking Dead: Our world and Draconius GO. The first two games utilize the same criteria-based manually created database of PoIs referred to as Portal Network, whereas the next three rely on algorithmically created PoIs. We use three factors in determining the quality of PoIs: 1) connection to real world places 2) uniqueness and metadata and 3) placement. Based on the three factors, the manually created PoI database used in Ingress, Pokémon GO and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite outperforms automatically generated alternatives in cities and near tourist attractions, and provides a more immersive, robust and safe platform for LBGs in comparison to alternatives. However, algorithmic options maintain better PoI coverage in rural areas, an issue manual solutions will need to address.