Pokemon Go Has Already Changed the World
Yesterday, while driving down the street, I saw a group of three kids with shopping bags from the local supermarket in one hand, and their phones in the other. They each had color-coded baseball caps on — yellow, red, and blue — and looked like they had never been happier to be running a quick errand for their folks.
Last week, I was on the beach, and struck up a conversation with some other twentysomethings for a good five minutes. One of them had dropped a lure module on a nearby Pokestop, and a small, diverse group of people had formed in the area, giddily walking around in circles, heads buried in their phones.
This weekend, I was at a hotel bar, and spoke with a man in his 60’s playing the game. He had joined team Valor, much to the chagrin of his younger sons, a pair of team Mystic faithfuls. There was a stop near the bar that we all paused our conversations to loot every 5 minutes or so.
It’s only been about a week since the full release of Pokemon Go, but the social and cultural impacts of the app have been so wide-ranging that it seems like a much longer time. The app has quickly risen to the top of popularity lists on the major mobile platforms, earning millions of dollars in its first days, and boosting the value of the recently struggling Nintendo.
Head over to the Pokemon Go subreddit, and the financial successes start to connect themselves to more tangible, real-world effects. Major landmarks all over the world are hotly contested battlegrounds for teams seeking bragging rights, local businesses are offering discounts for players that drop lure modules on their properties, and independent artists and craftspeople have quickly filled the void of real-world merchandise demanded by players seeking increased visibility.
The health benefits of the app have also been lauded, and not just because of the its emphasis on high step counts. Head over to Andrea Valliere’s awesome article on the ways the app seems to be an unexpected depression remedy to see what I mean.
The app hasn’t come without controversy. Reports of injuries faced by distracted players, muggings aided by the presence of Pokestops, and the discovery of a dead body by one wayward trainer, have marred the release. Clearly, when games spill into our real-world experience, the results are both unpredictable and heavy with consequence.
Most interesting in all of this are the critiques of the game that have revealed the deep inequalities faced by some fans of the app. Omari Akil wrote an amazing article on just that, which I highly recommend. The intersection of racial injustice and the widespread use of an app that asks users to wander their neighborhoods is something that the architects of the game may never have considered, but that certainly needs to be addressed.
It’s hard not to feel like we’re on the precipice of something big. The app in its current condition is rather rudimentary; it’s buggy, lacks a lot of function that players have come to expect from Pokemon titles, and seems to only just be climbing out of a host of server issues. But, given a few years of development time and sustained popularity, it’s not out of the question that this app will grow to a staggering complexity. Given its immediate success, it’s also only a matter of time until other developers try to jump on the bandwagon, creating their own augmented reality exploration games.
That all said, maybe the takeaway here is a little more complex than that. Pokemon Go has effectively gamified countless moments of monotony for its millions of users, connected people in unexpected ways, and positioned itself as a cultural icon within the space of a week. It has also raised questions about mobility, access, privilege, and community safety within that same week.
Perhaps the real question is this: how can we answer the questions raised by Pokemon Go? The fictional world of Pokemon is an idealized version of society based entirely around collection, friendly competition, mentorship, and teamwork. Pokemon go, in many ways, is reflective of that — but stands in high contrast against the realities of our highly divided society.
Well, as they say, you can’t put the Pikachu back in the Pokeball. The game is out, it’s wildly popular, and the world has already taken notice. It’s a whole new world we live in, and you’ve still gotta catch ’em all. Where we go from there is up to us.
Brad Decker is an English and Theater teacher, a member of Team Instinct, and totally caught wild a Scyther the other day. If you like what you’ve read, why not hit recommend below, and pass the story along to your followers? As always, you can check out Brad’s publications, The Synapse and Panel & Frame. Oh, and if you like writing about Pokemon, you can check out this article he wrote:
