Self-Reported Positions are Credible

The Error of our Ways: The experience of Self- Reported Position in a Location-Based Game reports the experience and lesson learned from a location-based gamed in which players manually reveal their positions.

It appears that remote participants are largely untroubled by the relatively high positional error associated with self reports. The authors suggest that this may because mobile players declare themselves on their current trajectory (stating their intent) or behind themselves (confirming previously visited locations). Therefor, self-reported positioning my be useful fallback when automated systems are unavailable or too unreliable.

They state:

Analysing of the communication between and movements of street and online players revealed that the performance of GPS has a major impact on the game.

This goes a bit against the direction of CatchBob! in which we question the accuracy as being a factor that increase the performance. But maybe here “performance” is meant as a mix of accuracy, availability and latency.

The goals of the authors were to deepen their understanding of the human issues involved in using positioning systems. Secondly in the technique of self-reported positioning in its own right.

The first and rather obvious observation is that self-reported positioning provided excellent coverage and availability. Players quickly learning to use it.

Players appear to be anticipating time delay (human and technological latency). Declaring a few seconds ahead of themselves provides time for the system to respond with new information and maybe even for them to digest it before they reach the next decision point – a strategy that will avoid them waiting around.

There were also players declaring and looking behind their current position. Panning behind would often occur when a player did not manipulate the map for a while and so physically moved ahead of their last reported position. One reason for deaclaring behind was to retrigger clues or for the benefit of online players what had missed it.

Rather than reporting themselves to be a different place, the players are in fact reporting themselves to be at a different time

The authors suggests that explicitly self-reported positions (declarations) should be interpreted as deliberate acts of communication. The user intent is not captured by automated positioning systems.

Two potential limitations of self-reported positioning are that the mobile player has to know where they are and/or where they are heading, and that they may cheat. It also demands the constant engagement of the user in order to maintain an up to date position. It is therefor fair to ask to what extent technologies that are ubiquitous should also fade into the background and become invisible.