The Emotions Geogame: Testing the Prototype and Exploring Emotions and Places in Ames, Iowa

The Emotions Geogame is designed as a mobile location-based geogame (Poplin 2025) that enables players to explore places and map emotions. It is based on the conceptual model of evocative places, which are places that evoke emotions, memories, and images (Poplin et al. 2023). The development of The Emotions Geogame is in the stage of a digital prototype that can run on a smartphone. It introduces a story of an Alien that comes to the planet Earth to learn about places and emotions. The player takes care of the Alien by taking it around in the physical environment, showing it places and sharing emotions associated with them. The mobile application implements the emotions grid developed by Hernandez et al. (2012) which models emotions on two axes. The horizontal displays the level of pleasure, and the vertical the level of energy. It guides the players to add the reasons for their emotions at the self-selected place. The options given to the player follow the categories from the conceptual model of evocative places, including physical attributes, experiences, senses, and values. This data collection module is just one of the modules implemented in The Emotions Geogame embedded in the game structure. The game encourages the player to go on missions, invite friends to compete in the mapping exercise, earn badges, and educate the Alien. The workshop the team is proposing will be organized around testing of The Emotions Geogame prototype. It starts with the introduction of the main features of the mobile location-based game and its goals. It then moves to the phase of installing the game on mobile devices. The main part of the workshop is an actual testing of The Emotions Geogame application in a real-world setting. It requires the players to go out, experience the environment, and map places and emotions. After this location-based exercise, all workshop participants return to the conference room to discuss their experience using The Emotions Geogame. The organizing team will be using a simple questionnaire to record the experience, which will also be shared in brainstorming by the participants. The workshop ends with recommendations for improvements, changes, and further development of The Emotions Geogame prototype.