Парадоксы разработки геолокационной игры: взгляд изнутри корпорации

Фольклор и антропология города. 2023. Т. 5. № 1. С. 108–126.

Glazkov K.

The current article is a description of development processes of a geolocation game in a big Russian financial corporation. As intended, the game should encourage corporate clients to pay via QR codes provided by partner companies and branches of the bank. Basically, the corporation invests into promoting a new technology — QR payments — very popular in Asian countries but still relatively unknown to the Russian public. The main focus of the research is comprehension of the factors that define what the final version of the game app will look like. The research is based on participant observation data gathered in September–December 2019 during collaborative work on the app’s game mechanics, as well as on seven semi-structured interviews with developers. Developers are required to make the game “interesting”, that is, to immerse the users into the game mechanics of the app to the largest extent possible, while encouraging them to follow the intended financial pattern — to make QR payments. This leads to impossible choices also known as paradoxes, and we highlight three of those: 1) lack of understanding who are the target audience of the app, 2) necessity to camouflage the core gaming mechanic of the game — making QR payments, 3) necessity to protect clients’ data. All the three paradoxes have no unambiguously correct answer, therefore the developers need to overcome them by making controversial decisions with high degree of uncertainty. All in all, we intend to demonstrate that a significant technological transition that introducing of QR payments in Russia depends not only on the decisions made by the developers but also on a multi-level context within which the development process takes place, on resistance of already existing payment practices and on how competition on QR payments market will unfold.

Keywords: геолокационные игры, location-based mobile games (LBMG), QR payments, corporate anthropology, QR-платежи, корпоративная антропология