NetGauge Games is a Twine-based platform hosting a suite of co-designed broadband-measurement games. Federally reported broadband coverage maps frequently overstate both performance and coverage, especially in Indigenous lands and rural areas. The dry "speed test" interfaces of existing crowdsourcing tools don't sustain enough engagement to fill those gaps. NetGauge reframes broadband measurement as an outdoor, locally meaningful play activity with community members able to author their own thematic content on top of a shared mechanics library supporting community ownership and technology transfer. Evaluation found that compared to an FCC-inspired Speed Test control, NetGauge Games increased measurements per user by up to 2.21x, distance covered by an average of 154 m, and exploration duration by ~15 minutes. Player-reported connectedness to others increased 124% and connectedness to environment 58%.
Internet inequities are a major factor in health disparities, particularly in Arizona's Indigenous lands. Crowdsourcing is a scalable answer to broadband measurement 47% of OECD countries already use it for policy and infrastructure decisions but existing platforms aren't designed to engage workers across time or space, yielding stale, spatially biased data. Without engaging tools, the very gaps that matter most (rural and tribal coverage) remain underrepresented in the maps that inform investment decisions.
Five iterative participatory design sessions with 11 participants produced a speculative-design catalog of 11 co-created broadband-measurement games and an annotated mockup of a flexible hosting platform (DIS 2024). The implemented platform hosts three games and was evaluated across three locations with 25 participants using mixed methods. The team is preparing R01- and NSF SCC-scale follow-on work pairing broadband mapping with cardiometabolic health and the FCC data challenge.
Co-PIs: Jared Duval (NAU) and Morgan Vigil-Hayes (Michigan State University) | PhD Students: Shelby Hagemann (co-advised) and Md Nazmul Hossain (co-advised) | Master's: Cole Pendergraft (graduated 2025), Hunter Beach | Research Staff: Chaithanya Heblikar, Varna Gobbur | Undergraduate Researchers: Olivia Vester, Taylen Johnson, Alison Graham
Duval, J., et al. NetGauge Games Platform: Connecting People and Place while Crowdsourcing Internet Measurements. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 2024 under review. | Duval, J., Hagemann, S., et al. Co-Designing Location-based Games for Broadband Data Collection. ACM DIS 2024. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3643834.3661502 | Hagemann, S. Unveiling and Engaging with the Humans of Networking Research. HotNets 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772356.3772400
