Introduction

In October 2019, the start-up Internet of Elephants launched Run Wild, a collaboration with the sports company Adidas, the Snow Leopard Trust, and UNEP.¹ Over ten days in the autumn of 2019, users of the Adidas running app Runtastic signed up for a ‘challenge’,² competing against a snow leopard (Panthera uncia) from the high mountain ranges of Central Asia. The human athlete was told: ‘Check Uuliin’s daily running stats and push yourself to outrun him. Connect with your wild side and enjoy a little friendly competition’.³

The snow leopard is a rare animal, with an estimated wild population of only 4,000–6,000 individuals across 2 million km² of remote terrain. In 2017, it was reclassified from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’ on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.⁴ The data that powered the Runtastic challenge were provided by the US-based conservation charity the Snow Leopard Trust and its partner, the Snow Leopard Conservation Foundation, and came from an animal that had been fitted with a radio collar as part of a long-running research programme in southern Mongolia.⁵

The snow leopard whose movement powered the Run Wild game was given the name Uuliin Ezen by the winners of an auction. Uuliin Ezen is Mongolian for ‘ghost of the mountain’, and the name replaced the technical identifier previously used for the animal (‘M12’).⁶ In and through the Run Wild game, the snow leopard not only acquired a human name but an online personality. His invitation to runners was disseminated via Twitter: ‘Hi, my name is Uuliin Ezen, I’m a real wild snow leopard from Mongolia’.⁷

Users received daily updates of Uuliin’s movements in the newsfeed of the Runtastic app. The posts were presented as micro-stories about his daily activities (hunting or foraging, social encounters) and challenges (including poaching). These posts were written as a first-person narrative and were accompanied by photographs taken from the animal’s point of view. Run Wild sought to offer ‘a fun and positive way for people to dive deeper into the world of endangered species’. It was, the organisers suggested, ‘as close to wildlife as most of us will ever get’.⁸

Apart from posting about his ‘athletic performance’ and the challenges of finding food and staying safe, Uuliin also promoted snow leopard conservation. The Run Wild campaign sought ‘to create a positive and powerful connection between runners and an endangered species, to grow their understanding of the complexity of conservation, and to harness support for the hard work it takes to keep Uuliin and others of his species safe’.⁹ Dr Charu Mishra, Executive Director of the Snow Leopard Trust and an avid endurance runner, said, ‘To be able to connect running with nature conservation – a most worthy social cause – is just wonderful’.¹⁰ It was hoped that Uuliin’s digital life would ‘encourage people to get outdoors, and through physical activity, help them create a meaningful connection with nature’.¹¹

Run Wild attracted considerable attention. Over 12 days, 499,000 people joined the competition, running 5.3 million kilometres (on average 19.5 km each). Twenty-one thousand people ‘outran’ Uuliin, who covered 50.1 km (and 5,800 m of climbing and descending), hunted and caught prey twice, and met a real human once.¹²

The snow leopard in the Run Wild challenge is a digital animal, not a sentient being.¹³ Etienne Benson would describe it as a ‘minimal animal’, a mere trace of the fleshly beast.¹⁴ Yet the digital leopard is an entity with a distinct set of affects moored to the fleshy leopard, even though separate from it. It is both active and mobile in the digital realm. This digital liveliness is based on the movements of a real animal, but its digital presence lies within the silicon and flickering bytes of the mobile phone. The digital leopard’s trajectory parallels the movements of the fleshy leopard in Mongolia. Yet it is also distinct and separate, with a measure of independence: the real snow leopard never runs the streets of New York or London, let alone sniffs around the database of leopard scientists or the server farms that process ‘his’ data; the digital leopard has never roamed in the Mongolian hills; it has never left the labyrinthine virtual ecosystems of the digital world. The connection between the actual and the digital leopard is the tracking device attached to a collar around the living leopard’s neck: a physical device that converts fleshy movement into digital data.

Digital animals, represented, enrolled, and created within digital networks, are proliferating. Scholars argue that we live in the ‘digital Anthropocene’, an era in which our understanding of nature and interactions with wild and domestic animals, and the wider environment, is increasingly mediated via screens and digital devices.¹⁵ Digital entanglement is becoming ever more ubiquitous, producing novel encounters between humans and non-human animals.¹⁶ In and through a bewildering variety of digital devices (e.g. computers, mobile phones, camera traps, tracking devices, and webcams) and apps, digital natures simulate, mediate, or augment actual nature.¹⁷ Digitisation, and the increasing familiarity of digital environments, undermines binary distinctions such as ‘virtual’ and ‘real’.¹⁸ Meaningful encounters happen in both digital and non-digital spaces that are interlaced in increasingly subtle, complex, and profound ways.¹⁹

Digital games in particular have begun to attract attention for their capacity to represent nature and shape human thinking about animals.²⁰ Games offer unique opportunities for virtual encounters between humans and animals. These may mimic those of real life (on Twitter/X, the runner is invited to ‘meet’ the snow leopard through the data on the app as if they were passing on a mountain trail) but are mediated digitally.²¹ Digital game environments offer immersive approaches to animal lives that avoid some of the physical and logistical challenges of attempts to enter the world of animals directly.²² Moreover, the activity of play suggests the possibility of particular kinds of sharing of animal experience by the human.

In this chapter, we explore digital games as places of human–animal encounter and the role of games and gamification in mediating those encounters. We focus in particular on games based on the movement of wild animal bodies, using data captured by digital tracking technologies. To stay with Uuliin the snow leopard, we ask what it means for him to be enrolled in digital form in a mobile phone game and what significance (if any) we should attach to the digital encounter between hunting leopard and phone-toting human runner.

Digital games

The world of digital gaming, especially on handheld devices, has grown rapidly since the beginning of the twenty-first century.²³ Digital games are played in a wide range of ways, from casual viewing through occasional playing to intensive daily engagement. Online games allow social interaction through shared experiences, collaboration, and competition, as well as in-game messaging.²⁴

Games can be thought of as ‘structured activities carried out for pleasure, according to certain written or unwritten rules’.²⁵ They are often dismissed as leisure activities that serve only to entertain. However, digital games are important in the daily lives of more than 2 billion people globally, with mobile games comprising the majority of the $137.9 billion worldwide games market.²⁶ The gaming industry provides an infrastructure that enables novel commodification under digital capitalism, interlocks play and labour (‘playbour’ or ‘playbor’), and contributes to significant material consumption (such as energy demands, mineral extraction, and e-waste).²⁷

Game studies researchers draw attention to the power of games to serve positive purposes beyond mere human entertainment.²⁸ There has been considerable interest in ‘serious games’ which speak to (and potentially help address) problems in the real world such as poverty, health, environment, or science.²⁹ Many games explore contexts like crime, violence, war, and apocalypse. But others offer experiences related to urban planning, sports, or the state of the environment.³⁰ ‘Serious games’ have found a place in education, training, and human behaviour change in a wide range of sectors.

Gameplay dynamics (competition with others within set rules, the winning of points or rewards) have been even more widely applied.³¹ This process of ‘gamification’ is routinely used in fields such as education, shopping, diet, or exercise, in the hope that the sense of play engendered by games will make activities more enjoyable and rewarding and promote continued user engagement.³²

Digital gaming worlds often draw on detailed representations of nature, be it a dystopian post-apocalypse land or an impassable jungle. These digital natures emerge from the digitally mediated interactions between the concepts of nature that developers employ in games and the assumptions, choices, and experiences of players who encounter them.³³ Digital natures incorporate both accurate and interpreted representations of earth environments and species as well as imagined, interplanetary, science-fictional and fantastical ecosystems, often merging the two.³⁴ Digital natures are diverse and complex both in the understandings of natures they engage and the digital spaces in and through which they are produced.³⁵

Digital animals are a common presence in digital games. As Tom Tyler points out in Game, video games offer a wide range of ways in which a player may encounter, understand, and engage with non-human animals.³⁶ They range from comprising an element of the backdrop of ecosystems or landscapes to resources or non-player characters, to hunter or prey, to the player’s in-game character, as in Never Alone, where the player’s character is alternately an Iñupiaq girl and her companion, an arctic fox.³⁷

While some worry that digital games might reduce direct encounters with actual nature, especially in young people,³⁸ others argue that digital games might contribute to better human understanding of actual nature, and that this might perhaps promote more benign relations with the natural world.³⁹ In Games of Empire in 2009, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter suggested that ‘games of multitude’ that engaged with the climate emergency might open up alternatives to global capitalism and unsustainable consumption.⁴⁰

There has been growing interest in the possibility that ‘games for nature’ might contribute to biodiversity conservation goals.⁴¹ This notion seeks to take advantage of the expansion of the games industry and the growing significance of ‘technological nature’ in people’s daily lives.⁴² Animals (particularly large and charismatic species) have a prominent place in debates about ‘conservation games’, reflecting their importance in conservation.⁴³

Digital games offer novel opportunities for humans to engage with non-human animals through digital mediation. As Tom Tyler argues, games can generate novel affects between humans and non-humans.⁴⁴ Games can potentially inspire curiosity about and empathy with other species, although how games shape human–non-human relations depends on complex factors, including personal circumstances and previous experience of nature.⁴⁵ They provide a means of seeing and engaging with animals that avoids the physical and logistical difficulties of direct physical encounter. This expands the number and diversity of people who can observe wild animals from the relatively narrow circle of skilled naturalists or wealthy ecotourists to gamers in their millions. Moreover, through their detailed digital worlds and the close engagement engendered by gameplay, games can potentially provide approaches to animal lives that are not only immersive but also intimate.

Digital animals

Digital animals can be created from the raw material of actual nature in various ways. They can be imagined fictional characters whose entire existence is digital, even if loosely built on nature, either as a cute cartoon character (as in Sonic the Hedgehog, or Donkey Kong) or as the denizen of a complete fantasy world (Avatar or The Mandalorian).⁴⁶ Alternatively, they can be rendered from actual animals, either through photography (e.g. webcams and camera traps) or by the attachment of a digital tracking device.

Recent advances in digital technology such as small lightweight digital devices, the collection of GPS location data, and the automatic and continuous uploading of data to geographic information systems have offered new opportunities for tracking the movement of animals through space and time.⁴⁷ Tags range in size and capacity, from those uploading positions daily or even hourly to satellites, to tiny geolocators weighing less than 0.3 grams that calculate position from time and day length.⁴⁸ Tags are now routinely fitted to birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, and other taxa. As tags get smaller, the range of species that can be tracked expands, and other data such as body temperature, altitude or depth, blood pressure, or pulse rate can also be collected.⁴⁹

Digital tracking has become an increasingly mainstream dimension of conservation, encouraged by reductions in the size and cost of tags and the increasing availability of computer capacity.⁵⁰ Digital tracking technologies extend human abilities to observe the lives of animals beyond the scope of direct observation,⁵¹ allowing the separation of the movement of individuals from population-level patterns,⁵² the mapping of territories, the tracing of migration routes, and discovery of key sites for conservation. They also draw attention to the ways in which the mobilities of human and non-human animals shape each other.⁵³

The human animal can also be tracked using digital technologies. GPS devices within mobile phones or smartwatches allow continuous location monitoring. This is the basis of both user-initiated apps such as Google Maps, and the commercial market in location data (for example, allowing retail corporations to analyse how long which kind of consumer spends viewing different shop displays).⁵⁴ These technologies also underlie a boom in the market for digital self-tracking of location and biological function. Digital devices attached to the human body have become an increasingly common accompaniment to both sporting activities and daily lives, a phenomenon described as the ‘Quantified Self’ (QS) movement.⁵⁵ Exercise and movement tracking apps (such as Strava, Map My Run, Runtastic, and MyFitness Pal)⁵⁶ and devices (such as smartwatches and Fitbits) that collect data on metrics such as location, distances travelled, and calories burned are widely used. The experience of self-tracking using such devices can create motivation to exercise and new forms of engagement with particular places where exercise occurs, although the motivational responses of users vary.⁵⁷ While literatures on the tracking of human and non-human animals have developed independently, it is important to note that a human runner using a digital watch to collect a stream of location and physiological data is as much a digital animal as a tagged albatross fishing in the southern ocean or a collared snow leopard in Mongolia.

The search for digital empathy

Human researchers have suggested that after prolonged observation of wild animals they begin to develop a sense of how those animals experience mobility.⁵⁸ Vinciane Despret describes this as ‘embodied empathy’, the exploration of non-human relationships by ‘making the body available for the response of another being’.⁵⁹ Can encounters with digital animals create an equivalent sense of ‘digital empathy’?

Digital technologies have a recognised capacity to create a sense of intimacy between humans and other animals for human observers.⁶⁰ Digital video, streamed through devices such as fixed cameras, encourages the curation of affective relations between humans and animals by transforming the movement of animal bodies into media that can be stored, re-run as ‘highlights’, edited, and shared.⁶¹ ‘Nestcams’ that livestream the nests of birds of prey on public buildings have become a significant social phenomenon, attracting audiences across the world.⁶²

Digital devices focused on actual animals, such as webcams or tracking devices, appear to offer an unmediated view of wild animals, free from human ‘intrusion’, but they involve a technological and physical separation of watchers and the watched.⁶³ In his chapter in this book, Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme describes how the lobster trap-cam on the floor of a Norwegian bay enables a form of ‘digital intimacy’, an ‘affective trap’ as well as a physical one. However active a remotely observed animal portrayed through digital media seems to be, however freely it traverses land or sea, it remains the object of the human viewer’s gaze. The observed animal is not, usually, aware of the observer, and certainly does not have the opportunity to watch in the same way as it is watched. The intimacy is therefore one-sided. Indeed, as Maan Barua points out, the power relations of observer and observed are integral to the affective non-human labour of charismatic zoo animals such as giant pandas.⁶⁴

However, some forms of digitally based interaction go some way towards overcoming this one-sidedness. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo found that burrowing marine garden eels, popular with visitors (and already livestreamed), were becoming shy with aquarium staff. They installed a line of tablets alongside the tank and invited the public to view the eels using FaceTime on their iPad or iPhone – to keep them habituated to human faces.⁶⁵ Also during the COVID lockdown, livestreamed video of rescued, sanctuary, and farm animals, and virtual guided walks with feral dogs in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone provided lockdown distractions for observers and new digital channels for attunement to animal life.⁶⁶ In these encounters, digital technology created, for the human observer, a sense of proximity to physically distant animals despite (or because of) the physical separation between watchers and the watched. Technology both linked and distanced human and animal. The experience of intimacy was dependent on a complex array of linked digital technologies (including mobile phones, laptops, multi-person conference software, and the Internet), the mediation of human ‘guides’ on the ground, and novel complexions of capital in the services provided by multinational corporations, for example, Zoom, Google (Meet), and Microsoft (Teams).⁶⁷ However, to some extent at least, interaction was mutual (if profoundly mediated): the garden eels became accustomed once again to the staring human face; the sheep on the Zoom call could see the camera and the people watching the video stream from their desk; the dogs could choose whether to respond to the human guide who curated the virtual tour experience.

Other forms of digital technology also provide the opportunity for digital engagement and the creation of a sense of empathy between observing humans and observed animals. The attachment of digital tracking tags to animals, and the collection of data on their location and their movement, can have powerful affective implications for human observers. Jamie Lorimer describes how constant radio location of corncrakes changes the perceptions of bird researchers in the Hebrides, leading to ‘corncrake-mindedness’.⁶⁸ Using such research techniques, the human observer could be said to share ‘embodied life and movement’ with an animal.⁶⁹. Such sharing could potentially be radically extended through the combination of data streams from self-tracking devices worn by humans and tracking devices attached to non-human animals. Such a combination brings into play the possibility of direct comparison between the movements of a human and a non-human animal.

Animals in digital games

The use of digital devices to track the movements of animals opens up the possibility of incorporating that movement into a digital game, as Run Wild did in 2019. In that game, Internet of Elephants created a direct link between actual animal movements and the movements of human athletes playing against them.⁷⁰ Their vision was to ‘engage massive new audiences with nature’ through the gamification of animal movement data, the imparting of knowledge and the creation of empathy.⁷¹ In 2020, Internet of Elephants launched an augmented reality game Wildeverse that allowed players to ‘find’ and protect digital versions of great apes, teaching the player about the challenges of conservation.⁷²

Internet of Elephants’ approach harnesses the ways in which mixed or augmented reality (AR) games allow elements of the actual and digital worlds to be combined through the sensory components in mobile devices that facilitate integration of computer-generated images or sound with actual-world features.⁷³ We use the term AR broadly to include senses and modes of augmentation beyond the visual.

AR gaming environments offer a novel context for human–non-human interactions and new insights into the lives of animals through experience of their movements. AR games such as Pokémon Go enable gamers to physically move through their environment in order to encounter virtual Pokémon.⁷⁴ While this can enhance their fitness and time outdoors, it does not necessarily enhance their connection to the non-digital nature around them. People are glued to screens while out playing the game – potentially disturbing animals or trampling plants and insects.⁷⁵ This leads to questions about what kinds of encounters AR spaces produce and how they might facilitate different interactions with actual natures.

To date, digital animals within AR games have tended to be based on detached representations of actually existing animals. For example, apps such as Wildlife AR and Safari Central allow users to insert moving simplistic three-dimensional representations of charismatic animals into the smartphone video feed of their desk or their street.⁷⁶ Run Wild, launched in 2019, offered a different approach to engagement with animals in an AR environment, blending data collected from tracked wild animals with the gamified human of the ‘Quantified Self’ movement. The game allows people to see their daily movement and exercise in relation to the movements of geotagged wildlife such as elephants and migrating birds. It has some similarities to a game concept called Race the Wild, conceived in 2011, and an idea proposed in 2017 to create an app to combine tracking data from humans and animals.⁷⁷ In 2021, Run Wild ran again in expanded form. This time, runners could compete with three different animals: Pamoja the pangolin in Kenya, Tendrel Zangmo the tiger in Bhutan, and Adjany the elephant in Angola.⁷⁸ Over 1 million runners participated in the 2021 challenge, covering a collective 12,870,639 km.⁷⁹

In order to investigate their experience of running against wild animals, we sent a short survey to participants in the 2021 Run Wild challenge who had signed up to receive updates from Runtastic. We received 238 responses.⁸⁰ Two thirds had raced against both the tiger and the pangolin, one third against the elephant. Ninety-two per cent said they had learnt about wild animals and their conservation by completing the challenge, 36% learning ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a lot’. The results suggested that participation increased motivation to exercise (70%), and that this motivation was linked to the fact that the animal being raced was real (65%). Most respondents felt more connected to nature after participating (65%) and particularly to the animal they had been racing (72%). This translated into increased concern for conservation in general (68%) and for the species they had raced against (78%). Most also claimed to be more likely to support conservation in the future (68%) and to be interested in future ‘races’ against wild animals (85%).

In an open response question asking for thoughts on the experience of participating, several users described how they found the challenge motivating. For example, one said: ‘It motivated me a lot to exercise and to track it more than usual. I sometimes went walking only with the scope to beat the tiger’. Some participants clearly found the game stimulated empathy – one said ‘the distance the animals walk or run is in some ways comparable to my way to work. I need money to buy food, the animals need to walk miles and miles to hunt or to go to the water hole’. Many respondents made suggestions on how to improve the experience: by increasing the period over which the challenge ran, offering more animals or animals with different capabilities, providing comparisons with the performance of other human runners or rewards for those participating, and so on. While most comments were positive, some concerns were expressed, such as: ‘I did not like the challenge; I felt it was wrong to disturb wild animals’.

Playing with animals

Run Wild provides some evidence that the gamification of wildlife movement data can contribute to learning and empathy on the part of human participants for the lives of their animal ‘running companions’. Several runners reported some form of connection and learning, suggesting it is possible that empathy with animals stimulated by the game might lead players to become interested in the welfare and conservation of the species and the places in which they live, for example through financial contributions or volunteering. There is clearly potential for game design to influence the form and depth of engagement for human players, such as in the way that the lives of animals, or the threats they face in the wild, are portrayed.⁸¹ Participants in the 2021 survey suggested that they would have been interested in the use of video, more frequent updates, or more exact information about where animals were and what they were experiencing. It would, for example, be possible to attach explicit ‘conservation stories’ to the racing challenge in the form of a larger ‘play space’ beyond the ‘run against a snow leopard’ challenge and more extensive links to conservation organisations on the ground.

Games that link animal and human movement could also have a role in animal behaviour research. As discussed above, field researchers already learn to ‘see like their subject’. Games that match bodily movement by a researcher to that of their research might help to create the conditions for ‘embodied empathy’ and could become a tool for conducting multispecies ethnography.⁸² It might also enable researchers who have worked directly with study animals in the field to continue some form of relationship with that study animal remotely, with its movements faithfully tracked by the unsleeping digital tag.

So, from the human perspective digital games incorporating the tracking of animals seem to offer the possibility of engagement and the emergence of some level of cross-species understanding and empathy. But what about the animal? Does the snow leopard in any sense ‘play’ with the human runners who compete with it? Not in the sense of fun: this is not ‘play’ as in a cat with a ball of wool or a dog chasing a stick. The sense of play is entirely one-sided. Indeed, you could say that the leopard is being ‘played’, as in tricked or ‘made sport of’.

Participation in the ‘challenge’ of running against thousands of humans in cities across the world might be considered a passive experience for digital animals, who can run as tirelessly, repeatedly, and endlessly as the cloud computing database specifies. But the data come from an actual physical animal that is fitted with a tag. In the case of the snow leopard, this is a collar which requires the animal to be tranquilised, a risky and invasive procedure even when done under humane conditions. The collar must then be carried for an extended period. Other animals are caught and tagged in different ways – methods vary between species, but they are inevitably invasive.

Whether its purpose is scientific data collection or the promotion of empathy, the tagging and surveillance of animals therefore inevitably have the potential to impose harm on the animal. These include the potential trauma of capture, anaesthetisation and fitting of the collar or other device, and any measurement and biological sampling activities carried out as part of the process.⁸³

Digital interactions between humans and animals are not symmetrical. Digital capture has been likened to domestication, resulting in a form of human control.⁸⁴ The observed animal is not, usually, aware of the observer and certainly does not have the opportunity to watch in the same way as it is watched. Animal celebrities are not aware of their status: intimacy is one-sided, creating an animal Truman Show.⁸⁵ Animals under surveillance may be presented to human audiences as independent agents living their own lives, but the combination of surveillance technologies and associated digitally mediated storytelling is an obvious exercise of non-human biopower.⁸⁶

The enrolment of animals to provide data for a digital game creates encounters rich in affect linked to non-human charisma. Surplus value is created through the affective labour of the tagged animal.⁸⁷ If a game is linked to payments (whether as donations to conservation or payments to a commercial entity), the interaction between human and animal potentially generates capital for those (such as game designers) harnessing animal liveliness. In her chapter in this volume, Katie Oliver argues that the chickens portrayed in the Our Chicken Life webstream undertake (involuntarily) ‘byproductive labour’, involving the disposal and accumulation of affect for the human viewer. The labour of animals whose tags provide digital location data could be thought of in the same way. The data comprise a new form of what Maan Barua calls encounter value, ‘the value produced in regimes of capital where the commodity is a living, breathing thing’.⁸⁸ The game recasts the target animals as lively commodities – commodities that depend on the creature in question being alive and, in this case, on the move.

Animals are widely made digital and serve in this way, featuring in the photographs of tourists taken from a safari vehicle for example, or on wildlife documentaries. But the animal whose movement is captured and held as digital data has a particular form of endless digital life. The tagged animal’s digital avatar can move again and again, racing against joggers in multiple countries around the world. Its digital servitude is potentially endless, limited only by the currency of algorithms, the maintenance of databases, and the fickle spotlight of consumer attention.

Human encounters with digital animals who are representing the liveliness of an actual animal in AR games like Run Wild may have the potential to enhance awareness, increase understanding and compassion, or generate meaningful human actions. However, they are limited. They may be able to offer curated and simplified insights into the actual lived experience of the real animal from which the data for the challenge have been obtained. But they are one-sided interfaces. The animal that has been enrolled into the game can have no awareness that the encounter with a human ‘competitor’ is taking place. They are not active participants in the encounter beyond having to deal with carrying a tracking device. On the basis of AR games like Run Wild, digital encounters would seem at present to offer limited prospects of truly ‘knowing’ the experience of the non-human lives of the animals represented. Nevertheless, their potential to open human minds and hearts to animals remains. Future research should explore the potential of this in more detail.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Gautam Shah and colleagues at Internet of Elephants (www.internetofelephants.com/),with whom we have been sharing ideas on conservation games for the last five years, and colleagues (especially Bruno Monteferri, Peter Damerell, and Anandhi Vivek) for discussions and contributions to work exploring the use of animal movement data in games based on running apps. We would like to thank Runtastic for sharing survey response data on the 2019 and 2020 Run Wild projects, and the editors for comments and suggestions.