The Pikachu Effect
Location-Based Gaming and the Future of Media Regulation
SUMMER 2016 witnessed the launch of what grew into a global media craze in no time — Niantic Inc.’s location-based mobile phone game Pokémon GO. Inviting over 500 million downloads within the first two months of its release and to this day holding the App Store record of most downloaded app in the first week, Pokémon GO is not only a turning point in the play culture of Massively Multiplayer Online Game, but also emerges as a form of mass media. As seen in the trailer above, the game shares the same global positioning technology as Google Earth, and relies greatly on locative augmented reality to ensure that digital spaces co-exist with real spaces, and that digital activity turns into real activity.
Pokémon GO’s use of locative augmented reality, however, is not the most original concept. Niantic’s very own 2012 game Ingress, for instance, employs a model of gameplay that anticipates the later Pokémon GO, where players are prompted to interact with “places of cultural significances — such as public art installations, landmarks, and monuments — to collect resources.” The limitations are clear: the app generates an amplitude of activities in urban areas with great populations, while players living in more remote towns might not find the game too exciting.
Often credited as the world’s first commercial location-based game is BotFighters, produced by Swedish company It’s Alive! Mobile Games AB and initially launched in Sweden during the spring 2001 (Sotamaa). BotFighters operates on a rather simple premise — players utilize real time location information to find and battle with other players. To support this new mode of contextual mobility, the game organizes physical infrastructures (familiar locations of streets, buildings, vehicles etc.) into the social architecture of a bot-fighting digital interface (Sotamaa). BotFighters’ creator, Lars Erikson, claims that: “What we’ve done is drape a virtual world on top of the real world.”
Both these games, BotFighters and Pokémon GO — by layering realities to create a “techno-aesthetic platform” grounded in augmented reality — introduces a sociotechnical environment that engages with ideas, images and characters, as well as commodified materials and physical bodies (Giddings). The information distributed by these games, therefore, are not in a separate plane other than our physical space, but rather, our physical existence is “actualized by the digital, imaginative information embedded in them” (Grandinetti & Ecenbarger). The imaginative appeal of Pokémon GO lies in this distinct ability to blend virtual spaces with the everyday world to create a hybrid reality. The Events page on the official website of Pokémon GO features examples of how imagined creatures of digital play are summoned and seamlessly overlaid on top of the player’s immediate environment during gameplay (Giddings).
Surely, Pokémon GO’s mobilization of the player’s “affective body” as the “enframer” of information is not radical (Hansen). A consumption pattern referred to as the “media mix” model — which is analogous to “transmedia storytelling” in contemporary discourse — has long been established in the home country of the Pokémon franchise, Japan (Eiji). Since the late 20th century, the vivid characters of the Pokémon fictional universe were not only consumed as manga, anime television series, and books, but also circulated among Japanese children and fans of all age groups in the form of collectible merchandise — cards, posters, toys, stickers and so on (Giddings). In this sense, the visual dimension of everyday reality was never independent from the permeating presence of commodified media.
While one could argue that a collection of merchandise largely remains at the private level, the AR aspect of Pokémon GO further necessitates an investigation of how a case of imaginative gameplay exerts control on the player’s public life. Indeed, interacting with a virtual character in the immediate environment as presented on screen requires the player to recognize that the materialized digital data is the result of their own action and to actively engage with their surroundings to achieve such materialization; the gameplay experience of mediating the digital application and the physical space transforms the player into a bodily interface (Hansen).
Simultaneously, the Pikachu effect extends beyond the “entertainment of idle moments” — sitting at a bus stop or waiting for a friend; mobile gaming is no longer an occasional situation, but rather transforms into a habitual expectation of the everyday life for the player (Sotamaa). It is worth noting that the Pokémon GO app itself does not harbor the function of direct social interactions — while the player can add friends and exchange gifts to obtain resources, communication (such as through a messaging system) is not possible. Therefore, other social media platforms or real-life interactions must be incorporated to ensure a shared gameplay experience. Player-initiated organizations therefore become an essential part of the experience; the Facebook group named “Pokémon GO NYC,” for instance, has over 12,000 members to date. Research conducted in 2016 shows the average user spends 33 minutes a day on Pokémon GO, compared with 22 minutes on Facebook and 18 minutes on Snapchat. At this point, the player’s reality is truly augmented in play.
The video below demonstrates how the pervasive gameplay of Pokémon GO leads to planned behavior, as the player tracks her physical and screen activity for thirty minutes.
Since the heyday of television broadcasting, our sense of temporality and normality of life has been mediated by mass media — many planned out their evenings with consideration to the specificity of their favorite television programs. The popularity of games like Pokémon GO seems to suggest that such a mass media platform of is undergoing transformation; nowadays, many personalize their spatial and “narrative” behaviors according to the intersubjective interaction with digital apps on their mobile devices (Giddings). Having established Pokémon GO as a game that manipulates the material and economic (a player will most likely spend money on the app) reality of individuals, all the while controlling the production, organization, and communication of urban spaces, another set of questions arise — to what extent is this media regulation deliberate? Do location-based gameplay carry the potentials of previous mass media — such as news coverage — to facilitate capitalist consciousness or political intervention? Popular media has already suggested that Pokémon GO carries political undertones — pro-democracy movement landmarks in Hong Kong are featured on the app, while college students in Caracas, Venezuela are using the game as a form of protest. Further studies would be necessary to determine the consequences of the Pikachu impact, which is a relatively new phenomenon since Pokémon GO’s release in 2016.
Works Cited
Giddings, Seth. “Pokémon GO as Distributed Imagination.” Mobile Media & Communication, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 59–62, doi:10.1177/2050157916677866.
Grandinetti, Justin & Ecenbarger, Charles. “Imagine Pokémon in the “Real” world: a Deleuzian approach to Pokémon GO and augmented reality.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 35, no. 5, 2018, pp. 440–454, https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.1080/15295036.2018.1512751.
Hansen, Mark B. N.. New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/columbia/detail.action?docID=3338851.
Eiji, Ōtsuka & Steinberg, Marc. “World and Variation: The Reproduction and Consumption of Narrative.” Mechademia, vol. 5, 2010, pp. 99–116. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/400552.
Sotamaa, Olli. “All the World’s A Botfighter State: Notes on Location-based Multi-User Gaming.” Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. 35–44. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002.
