Pokémon Go transforms our
public spaces into potential sites of exchange and purchase, and its
inhabitants into roving profit centers.
Pokémon Go is a phenomenon.
Despite having been released a short time ago and in a select few countries,
the game has garnered more active daily users than Twitter and is already
generating $1.6
million of in-app purchases per day in the United States alone. Nintendo,
which has a 33 percent stake in the Pokémon franchise, has seen its stock value
double since the game’s debut.
An “augmented reality”
spin-off of the popular Pokémon video game franchise for iOS and Android
devices, Pokémon Go uses your GPS to generate a virtual map that transforms
real-world locations into “PokéStops” that can be used to capture Pokémon or
collect in-game items.
Follow the prompts that appear
on your map and churches, public parks, university campuses, street corners,
and historic monuments become potential Pokémon hunting grounds. Location and
time of day are key: water-type Pokémon like Goldeen and Horsea are more likely
to be found by bodies of water while ghost Pokémon like Haunter are more likely
to be caught at night.
These PokéStops recently
prompted a small stampede
of players searching for rare Pokémon in New York’s Central Park and lured
roughly 2,000 people to the Sydney Opera House. Police stations
have had to warn people away from entering inside. Dozens of people appeared outside
a Massachusetts man’s home — a church that was converted into
a residence — after it was designated a Pokémon Gym where players can compete
against each other.
It may be a momentary illusion
in your smartphone’s camera, but there’s something delightful about seeing
fully rendered 3D Pokémon appear right in front of you, whether it’s on the
sidewalk or in the middle of a packed subway. Pokémon will appear at random,
making you occasionally feel like you really are an intrepid Pokémon trainer,
exploring wild grasslands and caves in a bid to complete your Pokédex (even if
you have to avoid bumping into strangers on the street). Although you’re using
your phone to navigate, the digital interface keeps you tethered to the
neighborhood, always looking for that one special spot that might net you a
rare and powerful Pokémon.
Pokémon Go’s design pushes you
to notice significant landmarks that you might otherwise miss walking down the
street, all so that you can replenish necessary supplies in your quest to catch
‘em all. While playing in Toronto, I was directed to several murals,
historical plaques, and sculptures that I had never seen before.
The app, which uses the
original 151 Pokémon that appeared in the game’s first generation over twenty
years ago, effectively combines the novelty of smartphone technology with the
nostalgia of its classic brand. But behind its seductive interface lie thorny
questions about the monetization of public spaces and our activities within
them.
Pay for Play
Video games have been a
cultural fixture for the past forty years, but the advent of mobile games, and
the familiar sight of commuters tapping away at Candy Crush or Angry Birds, has
made them seem more ubiquitous than ever. Pokémon Go takes us a step further.
By overlaying a game interface
onto real-world sites and landmarks, it collapses the distinction between the
physical and the virtual. And through the game’s transactional nature, it
abolishes the old boundaries of the marketplace. The public park, the community
church, the sprawling college campus, and the open square are all commodified
with Pokémon Go’s in-game virtual item economy, which supports a very real,
corporate one.
This is a welcome windfall for
Nintendo, which has recently seen flagging console and game sales. Rather than
waiting for sales in the home or through the digital marketplace — spaces that
game manufacturers have already saturated with products — they’ve figured out
how to turn every open, unproductive space in your city into a site of
potential profit.
The commercial intention of Pokémon
Go’s exploration and social features become more obvious when examining its
gameplay, which differs in crucial ways from its handheld versions. Pokémon
caught in the game do not have levels but instead “CP” or Combat Power. CP is increased by giving your Pokémon
stardust and candies — two resources collected by catching Pokémon (including
ones you’ve already caught) over and over again.
Players must also have the
right amount of candies to evolve their Pokémon to a more powerful form, but
collecting these candies is an extremely time-consuming process. Even the fact
that you can exchange your duplicate Pokémon for candy doesn’t significantly
reduce the amount of effort. Magikarp is a particularly egregious example. It requires
four hundred candies to evolve into the much more powerful, battle-ready,
Gyarados. Contrast this with the regular Pokémon games where you level up and
evolve your Pokémon by battling other Pokémon and Pokémon trainers.
In terms of combat, the game
ditches the typical four moves and turn-based battle for simply swiping to
dodge and tapping to attack. The higher your CP the better you’ll do against
other trainers’ Pokémon. You don’t even wear Pokémon down to catch them, but
instead use an inconsistent on-screen swipe move to throw Poké Balls until they
are caught. The purpose of the game’s systems is thus clearly discernible: to
wear down your in-game resources and significantly increase the effort you have
to make if you don’t want to spend any money.
The game — while free to
download — combines gatekeeping gameplay with repetitive mechanics and intense
grind, incentivizing players to buy in-game items with real money to make the
process easier. These micro-transactions range from ninety-nine cents to
ninety-nine dollars. In this way Pokémon Go monetizes players’ exploration of
the spaces around them, creating a tightly controlled virtual economy that
contributes to the profits of Niantic — the developer of Pokémon Go — Google,
and Apple, whose digital storefronts the game is downloaded from, and of
course, Nintendo.
A recent profile of Niantic in Motherboard details the
company’s previous forays into commercializing augmented reality. Niantic began
life as Keyhole, a startup looking at commercial applications of mapping
technology, before it was acquired by Google in 2004. Niantic was then
developed within Google in 2010 before being spun off in 2015.
At Google, it developed a
precursor to Pokémon Go called Ingress — an augmented reality game played on mobile phones
that cast the player as a hacker battling with other players for control of
special portals. These portals, just like Pokémon Go’s PokéStops, are tied to
real locations. In fact, many of the PokéStops found throughout Pokémon Go are
analogous to the portals found in Ingress. Niantic monetized Ingress by turning
businesses into sponsored locations that hosted one of Ingress’ in-game
portals. Niantic’s CEO John Hanke has confirmed that Pokémon Go will also have sponsored locations.
The Pokémon Go and Ingress
formula is reminiscent of William Gibson’s 2007 novel, Spook Country, which explores the reshaping of public space
for commercial ends through augmented reality technology. In his novels and
short stories of the 1980s, like Neuromancer and “Burning Chrome,” Gibson
explored cyberspace as a separate virtual realm hosted by large, centralized
corporate data networks. But in Spook Country cyberspace is an integral and
inseparable part of the real world.
One of the novel’s main
characters, Hollis Henry, uses an augmented reality headset and GPS coordinates
to track down a public exhibit where a virtual copy of River Phoenix’s corpse
is placed on the same Los Angeles street where he died. Spook Country, along
with the other two novels of William Gibson’s informal trilogy of the early to
mid-2000s, Pattern Recognition and Zero
History, is obsessed with trendspotting, and how spaces are mediated and
reshaped by new technology to support and cash in on the latest cool thing.
Gibson’s vision appears to be
becoming reality — marking the beginning of an upsurge in both augmented and
virtual reality gaming, and heralding a process in which the public sphere and
its previously open spaces are increasingly assigned arbitrary economic value.
This doesn’t mean the game
isn’t intensely enjoyable. It simply means that for the game’s designers
getting us outside is the point; through Pokémon Go, every location in our
world is a potential site of exchange and purchase, with players acting as
decentralized profit centers.
Savvy business owners are
already trying to get in on the action by buying “lure modules” to increase
foot traffic. A “lure module” is a special item in Pokémon Go that essentially
randomly generates Pokémon at that location for thirty minutes. A key part of
this is that lure modules are tied to a PokéStop, so businesses not adjacent to
a PokéStop must apply to become a designated PokéStop.
The geography of PokéStops is
extremely uneven. People playing in the suburbs or in more rural areas have
complained that there are barely any PokéStops or Pokémon to catch, and some
have noted that Pokémon Go’s economic potential is heavily concentrated in already
affluent areas.
Unequal distribution of goods
is also now a major component of Pokémon Go’s in-game item economy: players who
didn’t get a head start two weeks ago in the United States, Canada, and other
regions where the game was just officially released may not have a chance at making a real impact in team
battles at Pokémon Gyms. Pokémon Gyms are different from PokéStops in that you
can leave your Pokémon there to battle other players.
There is a real economic
benefit to having powerful Pokémon defend the gyms. Every day your Pokémon successfully
defends the gym from other players you are rewarded with Pokécoins, the in-game
currency used to buy items. Since the only other way to obtain Pokécoins is by
actually buying them with real money, players who waited may be out of luck,
unless they are willing to grind it out or drop the necessary cash to
successfully compete over this key resource in the game.
The Future of Fun
Pokémon Go as a video game
craze is not without precedent. The arcade boom of the late seventies and early
eighties was another time when video games ubiquitously used physical space for
economic activity. Nearly everywhere you went — shops, restaurants, and in one
rumored case, a funeral home — arcade machines were placed inside businesses to
increase foot traffic and profits.
Initially, in the heady days
of the first video game boom, these places were able to install a Pac-Man or Space
Invaders machine and pay off the initial cost quickly. A popular arcade machine
cost $1,200 to $1,700 at the time and could pull in anywhere from $300 to $400
a week. Even with the split with the manufacturer, businesses could pay it off
in a month or less.
Arcade machines were also — like Pokémon Go —
micro-transactional, allowing a player to bet their skill and whatever quarters
they had in their pocket against the toughness of the machine.
But Pokémon Go goes far beyond
the arcade games. It is much more pervasive, decentralized, and profitable, and
more closely integrates the economic relationship between real and virtual
spaces.
The enduring appeal of the
Pokémon series has always been its themes of discovery, exploration, and
friendship. Exploring neighborhoods with friends and strangers to catch
bizarre, colorful creatures in Pokémon Go is fun and builds on this appeal.
But it’s still worth
interrogating the logic that underpins Pokémon Go because play does not always
have to be contingent on the needs of capital. Augmented reality games have the
potential to go in any direction. We can make games that preserve the elements
of social exploration, discovery, and fun without yielding more aspects of our
life to the generation of profit.
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