Pokémon GO Is The Future Of … Well, Everything

Hi, welcome to the other side of the release of Pokémon GO. You’ve no doubt felt it. If you didn’t know what a Blastoise was already, you’re now far more aware of it than you were 72 hours ago.

Pokémon GO has taken the world by storm. It’s about to have more Daily Active Users than Twitter on Android. It’s bigger than Tinder. Nintendo’s shares have jumped 25% in a day. Its average daily user spends 43 minutes on it, more than Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, and Messenger.

Kids and cops are getting along, businesses are making money hand over fist as Pokéstops, and people are actually getting outside and running around again.

The paradigm isn’t shifting — it went and evolved early last week. You’re living in the new world. The last time everything changed this hard this quickly was the introduction of the iPhone.

So what the hell just happened?

Augmented Reality (AR) happened. To be fair, AR has been around for a while, as any dedicated Ingress player will be sure to tell you. But Pokémon GO is the first instance of AR catching on like wildfire and causing massive, societal change.

To be clear, when I say “Pokémon GO is the future of everything,” I’m talking about Augmented Reality, but the success of Pokémon GO has made the two synonymous. AR is the future of everything.

Every major player in the tech/app/gaming/mobile/advertising space is going to be getting into AR now, because if they don’t, they will be the landlines of the next era. Get ready for more Pokémon GO, as well as Facebook GO, Yelp GO, Marvel GO, Disney GO… you get the idea.

There is going to be a lot more of Pokémon GO.

We’ve Been Waiting For This

No new technology’s full potential is ever realized right away. Citizen Kane came out 14 years after the first mass market talking picture, The Jazz Singer. The first computer was introduced in 1822 (seriously), but we didn’t think to network them together until ARPANET in 1969. Even that precursor was just used for math and messaging, and it wasn’t until computers became civilian-friendly that we started seeing everything this “internet” could do. With a better internet came websites. With websites came social networks, pictures, blogs, videos, gifs, and everything else you know and love about today’s web. We shopped, made art, kept in touch, worked, and played on the internet.

Then the smartphone hit, and changed the game again.

For the first time ever, all of the amassed information in human history could fit inside every human being’s pocket (in the first world, at least), and with this revolutionary advance in human connectivity… we shopped, made art, kept in touch, worked, and played. The only difference was that now, we could do it wherever we wanted.

Which… hooray? I guess? Sure, it was pretty cool to order dinner on the train home from work and have it arrive at your doorstep at the same time as you, but didn’t it feel like we were waiting for something more?

Foursquare and Yelp struck pretty close to gold, but they just missed it. They were still operating in an “old internet” paradigm, one where “the internet” and “the real world” were two separate things, and one existed as a repository of information to serve the other.

The promise of real, functioning Virtual Reality felt like it might have been the next step, but in retrospect, it seems a bit forced. Even the best VR experience doesn’t try to dismantle the wall between the internet and reality.

Augmented Reality, through the staggeringly popular lens of Pokémon GO, has finally brought us that next step. We’re finally starting to see what is truly possible when every human being is walking around with a globally connected supercomputer in their pocket.

And that possibility is awesome.

Why The Hell Is Pokémon GO Working?

It is definitely working, but by all accounts, it shouldn’t be. Pokémon GO is exceedingly bare bones, one note, and repetitive. The nostalgia element certainly helps, a lot, but there is something more than that pulling people in. Birth.Movies.Death. has said it best:

Transmogrifying reality is exciting. Much of the best fantasy, I believe, posits a fantastical world just one step away from our own; if we simply knew where to look we would find a whole civilization of faeries or monsters or wizards. AR operates spiritually on a level not unlike the Hindu concept of Maya, the veil of illusion that keeps us separated from true reality. From The Matrix to Harry Potter this is the basis of our greatest fantasies, that we could pierce that veil and get a look at the truth beneath it. AR gives you the feeling that you’re doing just that.

To put it another way, we’re finally pulling the internet and all of its amazing potential out of our devices and throwing it up all over the world. That is what is possible when every human being is walking around with a globally connected supercomputer in their pocket.

So What’s Next?

As I said, Pokémon GO is extremely bare bones right now. In-game representations of real-world buildings are flat, there are only three types of locations in the game (random encounters, Pokéstops, and gyms), and out of a rumored 722 total monsters in the franchise, only 151 are included in this release. What’s more, there are currently zero social aspects in Pokémon GO’s current form.

But there are loads of ways for Pokémon GO to grow:

• Friend lists, chat functionality, and general social layering.
  Right now, you can’t message your friends in-app and coordinate an assault on the local gym. I still can’t believe I can’t do that.
• Battling outside of gyms.
  One of the defining aspects of the Pokémon franchise has been the ability to battle and trade with your friends. There’s none of that here, and you better believe that’s going to get added.
• Hospitals, shops, homes, libraries, and more.
  As I mentioned earlier, there are only three types of locations in the game. The original games had many more, with far more activities to perform at each one.
• More story elements.
  To be fair, these are already rumored to already be in the works. Imagine what throwing a Team Rocket wrench into the works will do?
• Quests.
  How about a real life Pokémon dungeon raid with your friends in your local public park?
• Temporary Pokéstops.
  If I own a business and my shop isn’t a Pokéstop right now, you’re damn right I’m willing to fork over a bunch of money to create one.
• More Pokémon.
  Probably the simplest and most obvious way for the game to grow, but a brutally effective one. Slowly releasing new monsters with each update will give this game legs for a long time.

And What Else?

Well, like I said, get ready for a whole lot more AR. Expect all of the big players to build AR functionality into their current apps, or to build out brand new ones: Facebook, Snapchat (who are already leading the AR charge with lenses), Google Maps, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Expect, too, for other big IPs to get into the mix: Disney GO, Marvel GO, DC GO, etc.

And, of course, get ready for a lot of bad AR.

Like Pokémon GO? How about Transformers GO to celebrate the release of Transformers 8: Punch Truck Love? Get ready for loads of sponsored Chevy content, ads, background pixel tracking (or whatever its AR equivalent will be), forced Microsoft product tie-ins, and terrible lag.

You’ll definitely like Game Of War GO or Mobile Strike GO! Imagine looking at Kate Upton or Arnold Schwarzenegger standing right in front of you, wherever you are, while you wait a day in between turns because you’ve already forked over $30 this week.

How about Angry Birds GO? Candy Crush GO? You get the idea.

Marketers Will Ruin It

Of course they will — they ruin everything. But the more important thing to recognize here is the seismic shift that has happened with Pokémon GO.

Has the technology always existed? Yes.
Have other games already tried to do what Pokémon GO did? Yes.
Will Pokémon GO be this popular forever? Probably not.

If you think Pokémon GO is the big deal here, you’re missing the bigger picture. We don’t have a new, fun game on our hands — we’re living in the next era of communication. The potential of a truly mobile internet is finally being realized after years of uninspired approaches to it.

Last week, we were all watching The Jazz Singer. This week, we’re watching Avatar.