For my Master’s Thesis I created a location-based mobile game that aims to motivate citizens to actively participate and discuss urban topics. In the game Community Circles citizen create geo-referenced contributions (ideas, issues, opinions & polls). Each contribution has an impact area that grows with its activity and can merge into communities. Further, each contribution has a lifetime, which can be extended due to the activity. The long-term goal is to grow and keep communities alive.

The game prototype consisted of a functional hybrid mobile app and a backend server. The concept was evaluated during a game trial involving real users. Following are some screenshots of the app:

In the  video below you can see a demo of the game concept. It shows the dynamic evolving of contributions and communities. This demo was written in Processing.

This work has been carried out within the interdisciplinary research project b-Part, in cooperation with the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) A work-in-progress poster was presented at the CHI’14 conference in Toronto, Canada. Further information is online at http://cc.b-part.eu http://archive.ulrichlehner.com/cc.b-part.eu/.