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 Pok\'emon 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 Pok\'emon 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.