The Effect of Pok\'emon Go on The Pulse of the City: A Natural Experiment
Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Leo Ferres, Diego Caro, Loreto Bravo

TL;DR
This study uses mobile phone data to analyze how Pokémon Go affected urban mobility in Santiago, revealing modest increases in street activity and suggesting implications for city planning and public policy.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical analysis of Pokémon Go's impact on city mobility using mobile network data and regression models controlling for land use and daily patterns.
Findings
Up to 13.8% increase in street presence during certain times
People slightly adapted routines without major behavior change
Game influenced leisure spaces and pedestrian activity
Abstract
Pok\'emon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and generally improving health, social, and security indices. However, the true impact of Pok\'emon Go on people's mobility patterns in a city is still largely unknown. In this paper, we perform a natural experiment using data from mobile phone networks to evaluate the effect of Pok\'emon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago, capital of Chile. We found significant effects of the game on the floating population of Santiago compared to movement prior to the game's release in August 2016: in the following week, up to 13.8\% more people spent time outside at certain times of the day, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects were…
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