Pokémon Go, and the World Inside our Phones
Pokémon Go has become, in the course of a couple of weeks, the most popular game in US history. The speed with which it took the world by storm is stunning: less than a week after it’s launch, it had blown out its predecessors on every conceivable metric.
But then, it seems that all hell has broken loose. The headlines have been filled with stories about the game causing people to fall off cliffs, crash into police cars, and get shot at all in pursuit of catching ’em all. You know, normal mayhem caused by virtual animated creatures. But through all the incidents of people breaking into zoos and quitting their jobs, we can start to see what a future with augmented reality looks like. It’s not as grim as you might think.
Worlds colliding
Critics of the game and of tech culture in general complain about the creation of iZombies, humans walking around in a beautiful place but enraptured their phones. They have a point:
But think about that for a second. All we’ve done is taken people that would have otherwise been playing Candy Crush Saga on their living room couches and pushed them into the middle of Central Park. What Pokémon did was take virtual gaming from the isolation of an airport lounge or a La-Z-Boy into public, central places. It’s not there yet, but we can start to see a future that uses a virtual world to enhance our experience in the physical one. The problem is that the game relies on a tiny screen we hold in our hands, and it requires our full attention to play. But even then, all human interaction isn’t lost. Far from it, in fact.
Notice that the most meteorically viral game of our time has zero direct links to social media. There’s no way to find your friends on the app, or to compete against people you know. There’s no social leader board showing you who you can trash talk. It works because it relies on real, physical interactions between humans. Yes, there are a bunch of people obsessively glued to their phones instead of participating in a nearby conversation or checking for oncoming traffic. But people also show it to each other. They compare notes. A physical camaraderie gets built around a shared virtual experience. Victories happen in public, sometimes in massive herds:
Think about that. An online game just created an impromptu flash mob. In the real world. For a virtual object.
This is nuts. Never before has a virtual world been so simultaneously integrated with — but still separated from — the physical one.
Staring at phone screens won’t last
In many conversations I’ve had, talking about virtual and augmented reality turns to a fear of a Wall-E like dystopia, where we all sit on our technically-enabled asses and stare at a screen as our way of interacting with the world. That’s still possible. But I think it’s more likely that we’ll find a way to embellish our physical world with virtual elements, making the combined world better than either one on its own. This “mixed reality” experience is what companies like Magic Leap are building, but somehow a game company beat them to the first step.
It’s not enough to say “look up from your phones, there’s a great big world out there.” The thing is, the world can get bigger and richer when viewed through our technology. In a sense, there’s a great big world in our phones too. World of Warcraft showed us the world inside of a screen, Pokémon Go showed us our own world in a totally different way. Before too long, we’ll be able to view our virtual and physical worlds as one, and we won’t have to be staring down at our phones in order to see it.
Gotta go, someone told me there was Snorlax nearby.
