NFC Heroes - Observing NFC Adoption through a Mobile Trading Card Game

Near-field Communication (NFC) technology finally is starts to proliferate on modern smartphones, enabling researchers to conduct research in the large in the real world. The research question for this work is to learn about the distribution of NFC tags in the wild. As there is, for good and for bad, no central registry or database of NFC tags, we propose a gamebased approach to capture the adoption of NFC solutions and technologies. We report on the development process and the lessons learnt from developing a NFC-based game. We present describe the game logic and implementation, share our experiences from two release cycles on Google’s Play Store and finally report on initial results and lessons learnt during the whole process.