Treasure hunt game to persuade visitors to walk around a shopping mall

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a treasure hunting game aimed at changing shopping behavior. Shopping malls consist of various tenants such as shops and restaurants, enabling visitors to find many kinds of goods and services in one place. Realizing this multiplier effect, the shopping mall manages to announce the shops they have and encourage visitors to walk around all over the mall. However, visitors tend to visit particular tenants that they know well and do not pay much attention to other unfamiliar ones. With such buying behavior, malls lose their appeal. We thus aimed to persuade mall visitors to visit unfamiliar shops through playing a game. We designed the treasure hunt game on a smart phone by introducing some gamification techniques. In the game, a participant looks for virtual treasures that are hidden in tenants, and the treasure emits a wireless beacon signal. An individuals smartphone presents the beacon signal status and text hints to provide clues to find the treasures, so the participant walks around the shopping mall to hunt for the treasures. As the result of our user study, we confirmed that the proposed method motivates participants to walk around the shopping mall while hunting for the treasure. Further analysis suggested that our method suits shopping activities of groups such as families.