Towards a Cyberphysical Web Science: A Social Machines Perspective on Pokémon GO!

The concept of Social Machines has become an established lens to describe the sociotechnical systems of Web Science, and has been applied to some archetypical cyberphysical systems. In this paper we apply this lens to a larger system, the location based online augmented reality game Pokemon Go!. The contributions are an illustrative application of the descriptive Social Machines lens to a system of this scale and type, and the use of simulation as a method for an executable description, which includes use of an ontology to represent partially the universe of the game.