Geo-sociograms
Gero Herkenrath, Carl Huch, Florian Heller, Jan Borchers · 2014
Location-based multiplayer games happen in real space so movement is not the location change of an avatar in a virtual world, but real change of a player's physical location. Additionally, movement is a core interaction of these games. This makes the distances between players a key element of the game dynamics. Annotating recorded movements requires video annotation which is time-consuming and prone to mistakes. To tackle this problem we introduce geo-sociograms as a method to visualize distances between players over time at a glance. We apply this method to existing data, showing that it leads to many of the same insights as traditional video analysis while being less time-consuming. A study indicates that geo-sociograms have the potential to help characterize types of location-based games. Ultimately, we hope that geo-sociograms will help predict movement patterns when using particular game design elements.