Entertainment beyond divertissment: using computer games for city road accessibility

Computer games today represent one of the most important businesses in the IT industry, as well as one of the prominent means of entertainment chosen by children and adults. Their popularity in the contemporary world society has led many researchers to think how they could be put to good use to improve the education of players engaged in a game. In this work we present a game that goes beyond this paradigm, which is centered on single persons and pervasively relies on players to pursue a service that may be useful to a community as a whole. The game we here propose collects and processes information about the accessibility of city roads to build paths that may be approached by people with impairments. Players that join the game are rewarded by gaining points and positions in the game ranking for each reliable piece of information they provide. Accessible paths, built taking into account such information, can be accessed through a Google Maps-like service which computes the shortest and safest path, for a person with a certain degree of disability, between any two given origin-destination points.