AGILE Workshop on Geogames and Geoplay

The workshop will be held as a pre-conference workshop of the 19th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2016 in Helsinki.

Geogames are playful activities in which the analysis and the creation of geodata constitute a core element of the game mechanics. The technological approaches adopted by Geogames are as diverse as the possible usage scenarios. Geogames have been realized as console games, browser games or mobile location-based games and make use of GI technologies such as virtual environments or simulations. Application scenarios include environmental education, cultural tourism, and Geodesign.

Geogames currently attract considerable interest from researchers and GI professionals. This is reflected by recent developments on the GI market such as Google’s announcement to deploy in 2016 - two years after the Ingress game - a second massively multiplayer Geogame. At the same time, Geogames raise a number of challenging geospatial research issues, e.g. the spatio-temporal balancing of the game flow or the creation of virtual game .

Workshop Program

The full-day workshop brings together researchers and GIS professionals interested in creating and using Geogames. It serves as a venue for sharing experiences and discussing technological challenges and solutions. We expect the workshop to provide a deeper understanding of the key issues in Geogame development and to help drafting a research agenda in that area. Additionally, the event offers opportunities for networking activities within the Geogames community.

Workshop Program - Tuesday, June 14, 2016
09:30am – 10:00am Christoph Schlieder
Geogames: an updated research agenda
10:00am – 10:30am Barbara Feulner
Geogames in Geography Education - A Design-based Research Study
Submission, Slides
Coffee Break
11:00am – 11:30am Diego Pajarito, Michael Gould, Ignacio Miralles, David Frias, Aida Monfort
A biking geo-game to gather commuting data
Submission
11:30am – 12:00am Thomas Heinz, Christoph Schlieder
The CityPoker Designer: A Tool for Geogame Relocation in the Classroom
Slides
12:00am – 12:30am Francisco Ramos, Joaquin Pereira
Are you a smart citizen? Try City Balls, if you dare!
Submission
Lunch Break
14:00am – 15:00am Thomas Heinz
Geogame design lab: agent-based simulation
(Bring your own Laptop)
Slides
15:00am – 15:30pm Working Groups and Panel Discussion
Coffee Break
16:00am – 17:00am Outdoor Playing of Demo Games

Call for Papers

Participants are invited to either submit a short paper (max. 3000 words) about original ongoing research in Geogames or a position paper (max. 1500 words) describing a game demo or an application scenario. Short paper submissions will be reviewed and selected for a presentation during the workshop. The authors of selected position papers will be invited to participate in the panel discussion.

The topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Thematic focus 2016: Gamifying Geoinformation Crowdsourcing
  • Experience reports about the design and development of Geogames
  • GI technologies in video games and location-based games
  • Playful approaches to Geodesign
  • Data collection games, VGI games, human computation games
  • Simulation and AR games
  • Educational Geogames

Submissions are welcome in the AGILE 2016 Conference short paper format

How to Submit

Please submit your contribution as a PDF document via email: