Pokémon Go: If Nobody Uses the Augmented Reality, is PG Really and AR Game? A Survey of Player Behavior

Pokémon Go (PG) is the world's most successful and researched 'augmented reality' (AR) exergame, with thousands of players and copious data supporting supposed exercise benefits directly resulting from the 'AR' game. However, we posit that PG's reported status as an 'AR' experience is overstated and misunderstood because 1) PG's AR features are optional and rarely engaged with by players, and 2) this lack of AR use is a facet of PG overlooked in most papers espousing the benefits of PG's AR for exercise. To explore PG's status as an AR exergame, we explore Azuma's definition of AR against the realized manifestation of 'AR' in PG's Basic AR mode and AR+ mode. Then, we discuss the results of an international survey featuring 64 current PG players ascertaining their usage behaviors and rationale for those behaviors. More specifically, we delve into the finding that 50% of PG players never use the AR features, 37% use the AR features less than 10% of the time. Thus, the ‘AR’ benefits of PG in related work are unclear unless AR usage behaviors were explicitly measured.