Jiangnan Xu
HCI Researcher + PhD Student + Designer
Social Interactions in Hybrid Spaces:
User Case Study of Group Raiding in Pokémon Go
Timeline
2022.02-03: User Interview
2022.04-06: Data analysis
2022.07-08: Write up
Role/Team
Project lead, UX Researcher,
and First author.
With 1 UX researcher, PhD advisor
Methodology
Qualitative:
Semi-structured Interview (N=41),
Thematic Analysis
Research Background, Question and Goals
In April 2020, Pokémon GO (an AR location-based game) launched the remote mode of raiding battles during the global pandemic.
Before that, raiding battles were purely in person. A group of users should physically be gathered in a certain place. This new remote feature allows users to join game sessions online, but the only requirement is that the session should also involve in-person players. Raiding is becoming a hybrid format.
Raiding in AR location-based Multi-players Game: Pokémon GO
Before this feature, there was little knowledge of how users collaborate and coordinate in a hybrid space (i.e., cyberspace and the physical world).
1) to investigate user experience of social interactions in such a hybrid space regarding issues encountered and expectations;
2) to make design implications for location-based games and other hybrid space applications.
Who are the users?
In-person Raider
They play the game with both in person players and remote players if any.
Remote Raider
They play the game online, grouping with other in person or remote players virtually.
Users can be both (Mixer Raider).
Research workflow
Key Results - Theme map
Conclusions
The main issue that players encountered during social interactions in the hybrid space (RQ1): Interoperability
1. The lack of an in-game communication feature forces users to use third-party applications to coordinate game activities, which adds users' workload to an extreme level.
2. Infomation exchange is not transparent from in-person users to remote users. For example, remote users can not know what in-person are talking among the group.
The three design implications (RQ2): Inclusive, Intergrated, Reciprocal.
1. The hybrid mode could make the product more inclusive regardless of the interoperability issue. This should be a trend for hybrid spaces.
2. Communication features should be added to the game, making the product a collective platform.
3. Add gamified elements such as badges/rewards to support leadership/mentorship behaviors among users, making the community more reciprocal.
Research Imapcts
1. Built an excellent collaboration with the company: Niantic. They like our suggestions on the future design of location-based games and planning to produce new designs based on our design implications.
2. Published the research in the top-tier international CHI conference, where more researchers could have meaningful discussions on the research questions and our findings.
Through inductive thematic analysis of the interview data, we illustrate the new social dynamics among players in the new in-person/remote raiding format, including large-scale international social media groups, newly formed and spontaneous leadership activities, and social activities beyond gaming contexts in the hybrid space.
Meanwhile, our findings reveal the interoperability issue that participants encountered, which supports the relevant literature by instantiating and highlighting this issue in an LBG as a typical example of hybrid space. Finally, we suggest that future LBGs and similar hybrid-reality experience designs need to build consistent
standards and guarantee transparent information exchange across multiple applications in the hybrid spaces.
Reflection and Future Works
All participants in our study are very experienced players (i.e., they started raiding several years ago). This ensured that they could share rich lived experiences because of their familiarity with the gamic environment and communities. At the same time, this focus also leaves room for future analyses that explore novice players’ perceptions and behaviors to understand experiences of social interactions in hybrid spaces of a general population. We believe the participants’ recruitment process causes this limitation. We recruited participants from Reddit’s/r/pokemongo board which dedicated the sample to hardcore players rather than the general population. Even though we asked participants in the interview about their social interactions with novice players and non-players, their opinions might be biased. To this end, caution is required in applying our results to the general population’s social interactions in LBGs as hybrid spaces.
Thus, future research is needed to consider people’s pluralism when understanding their social interactions in LBGs as hybrid spaces. Specifically, we must explore how experienced players, novice players, and even people who have never engaged LBGs before the study would interact with each other in this location-based hybrid space. For example, participants could be recruited from broader channels, not only game-related communities. In addition, we utilized qualitative methods in our research, which can lead the study to an in-depth exploration of participants’ lived experiences. In future works, quantitative approaches such as online surveys and questionnaires (e.g., trait classification tests and demographic info collection) could be conducted to support our analysis. Specifically, with participants’ trait classification, we might better understand the cause behind their behaviors and perceptions (e.g., preference between in-person and remote raiding).