
\section{Location based Games: Put the 'fun' in education}
Location based Games are at the intersection of GIS and gaming technology \cite{Ahlqvist2018}.
With game actions tied to real-world spatial places, this genre breaks the magic circle of games: they are embedded into the environment and the boundary between game and non-game are vanishing \cite{montola2009games}.
As they feature locomotion as an essential game part, a focus on certain aspects of the environment can be achieved by game related tasks.
These tasks can include educational aspects or reward special behaviour through ingame benefits as mean of gamification.
A playable game with good balance and a lasting impact needs to consider the trade-off between board and race style games \cite{1705427,kremer2013spatial}.
Board style games are dominated by strategic planning with less temporal restrictions, while race styled games favour the physical capabilities of the fastest players.

Popular examples of mobile geogames are Ingress\furl{https://www.ingress.com/} and the more recent Pokemon Go\furl{https://www.pokemongo.com/}.
These worldwide playable games barely embed the surroundings into the game except for the base map and some landmark-derived attributes \footnote{Pokemon Go aligns the land types with the possible types of Pokemons available}.
With a fine tuned setup of educational content, game elements and integration of locomotion on the other hand, location based games (also known as geogames) foster recognition of the environment.

\autoref{img:gg2} shows the map overview of such a game: FindeVielfalt Simulation\furl{https://biodivlb.jimdo.com/english-1/project-finde-vielfalt/finde-vielfalt-simulation/}.
Located in an orchard, the blue dots are caches tied to game actions.
To proceed in the games narrative story, the caches are to be completed.
The players have to complete a task with context of the caches' location.
\image{.5\textwidth}{../../PresTeX/images/gg2}{Geogame map view}{img:gg2}

\section{Research with location based games}
Usually, when the effectiveness of location based educational games is to be measured, the following pattern is applied:

After a mission statement has been defined and approved, a fitting statistical framework has to be developed.
Based on such a framework, questionnaires have to be derived.
As some metrics cannot be retrieved directly from the questionnaires answers, the statistical framework needs to considers these and consider measureable informations to derive the original metric from.
The finished and for alignment with the mission statement approved questionnaires are then applied at field test with users from the target groups.
Each field test consists of an upstream questionnaire, a pass of the location based game and a final round of questionnaires.
After an data entry step for paper-based questionnaires, the raw results are fed into the statistical framework implemented in a statistical processing software to retrieve the final results.

\cite{Schaal2017} describes this development in the context of the BioDiv2Go project.
\autoref{img:biodiv-schaal} shows the resulting statistical framework for the valuing of biodiversity as target variable of the location based geogame developed in the BioDiv2Go project.


\image{\textwidth}{../../PresTeX/images/biodiv-schaal}{Statistical framework for BioDiv2Go\cite{Schaal2017}}{img:biodiv-schaal}

