Educating Adults with a Location-Based Augmented Reality Game: A Content Analysis Approach

With the exception of Pokemon Go, relatively little is known about other Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) games, and the attitudes of middle-aged and elderly adults towards them are hitherto poorly examined. The aim of this research is to examine the opinions of young, middle-aged, and elderly adults about the location-based MAR game Ingress. The responses to questions related to Ingress were collected from 24 adult players aged 20-60 from Greece and subsequently were analyzed by means of content analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using the Jaccard index of similarity. Our findings showed that opinions of young people (20-35) agree more with those of elderly adults (>52) than with those of the intermediate age group of 36-51. It was also revealed that knowledge of geography facilitates the ability to play the game better, the game's scenario is very interesting to adults, and the feeling of playing locally in a global game is also appreciated by all age groups. Along with these findings, with this research, it was shown that (a) content analysis is a valuable method for exploring opinions and attitudes of adult users towards MAR games and (b) Jaccard indices can be used to quantitatively explore themes emerging from content analysis.