There are two interesting properties of the mobile app Pokemon Go, and unfortunately in both cases it’s not the most interesting possible fulfillment of those themes. And yet, I kind of stick with it, though I have long periods of time where I don’t bother with it.
The first thing about Pokemon Go worth talking about applies to all iterations of Pokemon. It belongs to an interesting subgenre of games where I think there’s a possible “killer app” that no game developer has yet produced. These are games that combine caring for a virtual pet or life form, breeding or combining virtual life forms, and training virtual life forms for some purpose, usually combat.
Pokemon is by far the best known of these games, but others include Tamagotchi (where the virtual pet is carried in a small cheap electronic device of its own, an ‘egg watch’), Dragon Quest Monsters Joker, Monster Rancher, and to some extent games produced by the Japanese studio Atlus in the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. At least some players of various iterations of The Sims play it in this way as well (where the player sees herself as protecting and nurturing a household of Sims). I’d even argue that some tactical combat games like X-Com and Wartales have a distant family relationship with these sorts of games—players often end up feeling very attached to and protective of their alien-fighting soldiers and mercenaries who develop from rookies to experienced warriors over time. Even games that have you playing as the manager of a sports team (especially of fictional randomly-generated players) have a touch of this idea behind them.
The central hook in a game with this theme or design is that your focus as player is on the acquisition, care and training of a virtual life form that is not you. If there’s combat or conflict in the game, you are involved only as a coach, trainer or commander for a creature or virtual person that you can give orders to. You are responsible to your charges—they may perform badly if they come to mistrust you or see you as incompetent, and perform well if they love you or respect you because of your guidance and care.
I say there’s no “killer app” in this area because the prevailing models, most particularly Pokemon, are so stuck in their own long-running ruts, to some extent a result of the relative design conservatism of a lot of Japanese game developers. Pokemon, including the mobile app Pokemon Go, is pinned to a model of “catching them all”, in which each successive release of a new Pokemon game for consoles leads to a flood of new Pokemon creatures who are increasingly just minor visual variations on previous generations of Pokemon. Here and there in the now-crowded menagerie of Pokemon there are some surreal and wonderful creatures—a little dinosaur who mournfully wears the skull of his dead mother, for example. There are some really weird, so-bad-they’re-almost-good Pokemon, like one that is a living trash bag full of garbage.
But mostly chasing the one Pokemon you haven’t got or waiting for the developers behind Pokemon Go, Niantic, to release new Pokemon models, gets very tedious. When I open the app now, I see a bunch of Pokemon that I’ve already caught and evolved to their more powerful forms and trained. Catching the same old thing over and over again just to harvest incrementally-accruing resources is the essence of a hedonic treadmill, the kind of experience that shades into feeling like work.
The app isn’t helped by the famously weird, queasy mythology lying behind Pokemon overall—it’s set in a fictional world where pre-teen children leave home to hunt Pokemon in the wild and set them against each other in battle in arenas, where the captured Pokemon are kept in some kind of miniaturized or virtualized form inside a small device (which we hear from time to time that most Pokemon dislike), where there are stations in most communities that care for injured Pokemon staffed by what appears to be an army of clone nurses, and where there are white-coated professors specializing in Pokemon science who work with the trainers who capture wild ones. Oh, and there are Pokemon who appear to have created time and space who nevertheless can be captured by a twelve-year old and stuffed into a ball along with the rest.
The weirdness wouldn’t matter very much if the gameplay involved a much smaller number of more individualized Pokemon and a much richer kind of interaction with them. I think that’s the “killer app” that no one has really made, and it might just be that the AI necessary hasn’t been possible—where you’re caring for a very few creatures (or just one) that has a really richly unique and specific personality and where the interactions you have with it are closer to an actual relationship that evolves over time.
For that to really work, you’d also have to have a rich world to explore and interact with. That’s the second thing about Pokemon Go where I think it’s not really the best possible realization of genre potential. It’s a mobile app that has significant elements of being an “augmented reality” (AR) game—a game that overlays itself on the real world, using the locational capabilities of a smart phone.
AR is one of those things that game designers, futurists, pundits and cultural analysts love to bundle into breathless and unthoughtful narrations of the wonders of our near-term future consumer culture. Like its cousin virtual reality (VR), AR comes with some intrinsic problems that can’t simply be solved with better or different hardware, faster processors, or improved design conventions. Most fundamentally, an AR game either has to be played in a safe space built expressly for that purpose (at which point it’s really VR, not AR) or it has to be played through hardware and an interface that poses some serious risks to the user and to people around the user precisely because it overlays one visualization of reality over another.
Pokemon Go does this fairly modestly, following design precepts used by Niantic in a previous mobile game. When you open the app, you see on your phone screen a map of the world around you drawn from the same sources that Google etc. uses. Pokemon “spawn” on your map, and you can catch them by throwing Pokeballs at them. You see “Pokestops” on your map as well where you can spin a circle and receive resources, including a marker of having been at that location.
You interact with other players in various ways. There are “gyms”, more elaborate Pokestops, that can be controlled by teams of other real-world players (they deposit one of their many trained Pokemon there temporarily), which other players can attack and try to capture. If you meet someone else who is playing, you can trade Pokemon with them or you can mutually agree to a battle between your Pokemon. You can send gifts to other players who are friends. There are various quests that typically involve repetition of a basic task (gather X of a resource, capture Y of a particular type of Pokemon, walk Z distance in the world).
The shortcomings are in the details. Cities are privileged places for Pokemon: there are huge numbers of Pokestops, there are many other players around, many Pokemon spawn all over the place. At the same time, the dangers of playing compound a bit—you have to be looking at the phone while you are walking through crowds and trying not to walk into the street or somewhere else dangerous. The developers have done a fairly good job over time fixing some issues that appeared early on with Pokemon spawning in places where players shouldn’t go or shouldn’t be playing—in churches, in private areas behind fences or walls, and so on. But there’s very little sense of thematic coherence—the game’s algorithms don’t really “know” anything about the world they’re displaying to you, and don’t generally spawn Pokemon that would be highly appropriate to the environment around you (with a few minor and debatable exceptions). If you live in a rural area, you’re basically screwed—the game is close to unplayable in those locations.
A design that took AR more seriously and thoughtfully would still pose the problem of putting people who were playing in the midst of people who weren’t. It’s already eerie enough to be surrounded by people in a city who are half removed from the world they’re traversing—as I walk through urban crowds this week, I’m constantly hearing people having arguments, conversations, etc. with someone who isn’t there, because they’ve got an earbud on and a phone that’s connected to someone. If I arrived here from a time machine that left in 1980, I would think I was witnessing a massive mental health crisis. Immersive, interesting AR would make the disjunctive sense even worse, even if (especially if) it was amplifying how we saw and reacted to the materiality of the real world. Pokemon Go does have some great moments in that respect—the game doesn’t “know” the world, but PokeStops appear at plaques or non-obvious landmarks, making you aware of what’s around you, giving you the name of public artwork that was unlabelled. (There’s a Calder mobile at Swarthmore College whose name I never knew until I saw it on Pokemon Go, for example.) But intentionally designing around that would radically bifurcate the world between players seeing its augmented form and everyone else. I might find it interesting to walk around while playing a game that put fictional vampires or monsters in my way, or that offered secret puzzles and challenges on the walls of real buildings, but I don’t think I would enjoy sharing the sidewalk with people playing that game while I wasn’t. The best possibility I can think of for AR is to build sequestered areas of the world—sort of a off-the-leash dog park—for AR players where they can have fun playing and everyone else can be bemused at their play. The idea is great—and maybe even more for augmenting information about the world than it is for gameplay. But it has basic problems that are not technological.