The 🔥 Behind Pokémon GO
The early morning of day two of using Pokémon GO I was killing some time before starting a volleyball tournament at a local park. The first person I saw was a bearded dad rolling a stroller and staring at his phone, looking up and down as he went. I said, “Pokémon?” He smiled and we started talking as we walked toward the nearest Pokéstop together. Huh?
Traditional news outlets are covering it, police departments are issuing warnings, new vocabulary is appearing in your social feeds, and organized roaming bands of people are appearing in your neighborhoods. Something’s happening like we’ve never seen. WTF is going on and what does it all mean?
The Pokémon Company finally released its app Pokémon GO in the US—and it’s 🔥🔥🔥.
The app’s general gameplay sounds innocuous: find creatures of varying availability as they appear on a map and collect them, growing in experience, difficulty and capabilities with continued success. But there’s way more to this game.
WHAT’S FUN ABOUT IT
1. It’s Pokémon!
Based on the 90s Japanese cartoons and gamelore about capturing, collecting, and training these powered fantasy creatures that was massively popular and fittingly quirky.
So you’ve instantly got all this going from the start:
• brand equity
• retro appeal
• nerd factor
• context for gaming
• character/universe familiarity
• millions of activatable users
2. It’s Finally Pokémon
Newly detached from their short-sighted parent company, console maker Nintendo, who was never going to release an app for competing platforms, The Pokémon Company announced they’d finally release an app for iOS and Android, to great reception from fans.
• anticipation
• demand
• scarcity
• platform novelty
3. It’s in the Real World
The game’s map is a real map of your neighborhood, and your position on it is determined by GPS, and your targets are out there. The only way to compete is to get off your butt and venture out into the actual world, a novel experience for most gamers, somewhat analogous to the geocaching experience, especially as some of the features use notable places of interest: landmarks, statues, etc. as gaming features, promoting local discovery and traffic. And the only way to evolve an incubating egg is to walk a specified number of kilometers. The app experience also brings people together in new and fun ways — more on this later.
• serendipity
• exercise
• interaction
• mobile — inherently and thoroughly
• educational
• social — as in real people
• experiential novelty
• surprise and delight
4. It’s Augmented Reality
A critical part of the game is capturing the Pokémon, and this is where it leverages all the power of today’s phones and mobile networks. GO’s capture view uses Augmented Reality (AR) to let its users see their target creatures floating in actual real world space from their character’s perspective. It’s just an entirely new, fun thing to see the Jigglypuff you used to have as a trading card moving around in your neighborhood park.
technical novelty
• pure fun
• brand love
• surprise and delight
It’s also got the classic gaming mechanics previously mentioned, which should serve to keep enough users interested at all levels, which is something on which many games rely solely, and while they’re this game’s least significant feature they’re done really well. That’s how much is going on here.
HOW MARKETERS WILL EXPLOIT THIS
The inevitable entrance of brands will surely bring one or more of the following:
• branded creatures — capture the new Coca-Cola branded creature
• brand Pokéstops — stop into a Starbucks to load up on bonus items
• sponsored Pokéstops — the Huntington beach lifeguard tower #5, brought to you by Coppertone
• sponsored items — special accelerated incubators only for T-Mobile subscribers
• sponsored billboards — there’s plenty of empty space on the neighborhood maps that could be used for banners and such
You get the idea. But as long as the Pokémon company maintains balance and requires value contributions by sponsoring brands things should be manageable.
Brands, we’ve been warning this since Second Life and the early days of connected console gaming, and now the light is truly at the horizon: get your digital assets—your 3D, animated, and/or interactive objects—ready for augmented and virtual media properties.
THAT SOCIAL THOUGH
After I left bearded stroller dad, I turned a corner heading to another Pokéstop, when an older jogger wearing old school foam walkman-style headphones suddenly stopped and whipped out her phone, looking up and down, then flicking the screen. I said, “You’re playing it, aren’t you?! Pokemon?” hoping I was right because it would be really weird otherwise, but she nodded, laughed and gave me a thumbs up.
That same night I detoured walking to my car to hit another Pokéstop and ran into three people hunting the same location. We had a quick laugh and comparison of notes. And before going to bed that night I was already being asked via Facebook to participate in multiple Pokémon bar crawls. Don’t judge.
There’s no greater social effect than social proof. It’s a huge part of what we’re all chasing with this Likes and Shares business on social media. But the real life component, the visible participation and enjoyment, that’s the real gold.
Social movements aren’t insignificant. When we see people converging in real life based on interest in a positive context, we have opportunity for positive interactions and connection and growth. Even if the occasion is superficial and temporary, seeing our neighbors gives us a sense of belonging, community, and presence. Gathering around monuments, landmarks and public art bonds us to our own turf and exposes us to new turf. It’s easy to imagine how the developers could grow this for the greater good.
I haven’t seen anything like this with handheld devices since the early days of iPods when you’d walk past another rare iPod owner on the street, identifiable by their white earbuds, and you’d give each other “the iPod nod” in mutual recognition of your shared secret found coolness, a mere sliver of what’s happening here.
Eventually there was an anti-nod, black headphones group, but all the same, Seth Godin concluded, “It proves people like it when they find other people like them. People who don’t like being part of the main tribe still like being part of a smaller tribe.”
And Pokémon GO is just that, a weird little fun way to use your most personal device to play a silly game that revisits a childhood fascination wherever you may be with whomever else cares about the same things.
