Vamonde Category Adoption: Pokémon GO

By: Daniel Rowe

What is Pokémon Go? And how is it different from traditional gaming?

Over the last few months, we have seen Pokémon GO grow from an interesting nostalgic development into the future of gaming. We’ve seen Pokémon GO overtake Tinder, Twitter, and Candy Crush Saga — apps that have been out for years — in a week.

Nintendo, investor in both The Pokémon Company and Niantic, the developer of Pokémon GO, also had its best one-day stock jump since the 1980s based on worldwide demand for Pokémon GO, and the mayor of Rio invited Pokémon GO to Brazil for the Olympics.

But what is Pokémon GO? Essentially, Pokémon GO is the same video game that debuted in 1996, but rebuilt for a mobile, 21st century audience. Just like the original version of Pokémon, players capture Pokémon, train them to improve their skills, and use them to compete in tournaments à la Karate Kid. However, instead of playing Pokémon at home, Pokémon GO players use their smartphones to search for Pokémon that have been hidden throughout the world. Pokémon have been spotted at coffee shops, parks, national monuments, churches, and on and on: if you’ve seen people huddling together staring at their phones, chances are a Pokémon is nearby.

Vamonde and Pokémon GO — spatiotemporal adventures

Gamers in the past have traditionally been limited to whatever virtual worlds game creators have built, and many game studios have spent millions on technology designed to develop the most realistic virtual worlds. The revolutionary shift in Pokémon GO — and what we have been working on here at Vamonde — is to use real life as the basis for games or adventures.

Vamonde was founded in 2015 with the goal of using Pokémon GO-style attributes to tell stories out in the world. Where Pokémon GO places virtual Pokémon out in the world for players to find, Vamonde places stories — fiction or non-fiction — out in the world for people to experience. Imagine reading The Da Vinci Code, but instead of sitting at home reading about Dr. Robert Langdon’s adventure, you go to the Louvre and the first chapter of the story unlocks for you. After experiencing the first chapter (and perhaps solving a puzzle), you are then directed to the next step of the adventure — the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich — to unlock the next piece of the story.

These locks, officially called spatiotemporal locks, allow authors to control what readers and players see based on location, time of day, weather, phase of the moon, etc. By providing authors these tools, we are allowing them to include real-life elements in their stories and extending the traditional novel by synthesizing the novel with elements of place and time. Niantic has used similar locks as the foundation for Pokémon GO throughout the world, and at Vamonde we are building on this technology in order to create a new category of storytelling.

The goal — use technology to re-engage people in the real world

Anijo Mathew, founder of Vamonde and professor of design at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, has focused his academic research on how technology changes the way that people interact with the world (“cell phone zombies” being my favorite illustrative phrase) and started Vamonde as a way to use technology to re-engage people with the world around them. As people play Pokémon GO or experience adventures on Vamonde, a number of things is changing about the way people are using technology.

The advent of Pokémon GO has helped define a category of entertainment that allows people to understand and adopt, which is incredibly valuable for us here at Vamonde. Om Malik posted a really interesting story on The New Yorker magazine describing how his expectation of content shifted after using Pokémon GO. As people begin to internalize how technology like Vamonde and Pokémon GO can change the way they interact with the world, we will see category adoption continue. At Vamonde, we know this is just the beginning and we’re excited to be on this adventure.