VICTORIA NG

 

In July 2016, Pokémon because another franchise that joined the platform of mobile gaming with the release of the now-famous Pokémon Go. As an avid fan since childhood, I immediately joined, and spent months after walking places: Up the road to the nearby park, bus stops, down to the supermarket, and more. Why? Because I could suddenly catch Pokémon on my phone.

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Pokémon Go is the result of a collaboration between Niantic and Nintendo. Niantic was the parent company of the mobile game Ingress, from which a lot of the locations in Pokémon Go are used. It uses the GPS of an individual’s mobile phone to locate and capture Pokémon, as well as find locations called PokéStops and Gyms, both of which yield items. The latter provides a battling environment both to compete between teams (of which there are three: Valor, Mystic, and Instinct, which are red, blue, and yellow respectively), and sometimes for large-scale ‘boss fights’ known as raids, which encourage cooperation between everyone. Pokémon Go also makes use of an Augmented Reality (AR) system with a phone’s camera, allowing it to look like a Pokémon you encounter is appearing in the background of wherever you point your camera (which, admittedly, was a huge drain on my phone battery and so I stopped using it).

 

The main attraction for me began, of course, with the idea of catching Pokémon itself. However, in this age of the Internet, it was not long before Facebook groups sprang up to coordinate meetups and teamwork. You could find other people playing the game, organize a time to hang out and catch some Pokémon, or notify everyone nearby about a local raid battle taking place at a gym. Put simply, while it can be played alone, Pokémon Go has the potential to be incredibly social, and I’m hoping to explain why.

 

Pokémon Go’s use of AR meant Nintendo could ‘combine the physical and virtual worlds into one interface, replacing stationary play with active play by requiring users to explore their physical surroundings’ (Ruiz-Ariza, Casuso, Suarez-Manzano, and Martínez-López, 2018). Put very simply: If you wanted to play in Pokémon Go’s virtual world, you had to go outside into the physical one. The game did this by encouraging players to visit locations in real life (commonly shortened to IRL in the online community) and then interacting with the virtual world locations thanks to your phone’s GPS signal.  Because locations were fixed in game (and therefore IRL), it wasn’t uncommon for players to encounter each other. The current gameplay style – especially with raid battles – also encourages multiple players to meetup and work together.

 

Loveday and Burgess (2017) analyse the effects on social interaction due to playing this game, via an online questionnaire (while there are flaws to this method, including collection of results and the amount of data, this is not the place it will be discussed). Answers to the questionnaire include ‘Shared experience with my children’, ‘…I've gone to a few Pokémon Go meet-ups before with hundreds of people all catching Pokémon’, and ‘In general, most strangers I met while playing the game had been extremely helpful and friendly, either the ones on the street or from the Facebook groups. Definitely positive feel to the experience dealing with other people’ (Loveday and Burgess, 2017). However, they also pointed out one participant, who said ‘I have become less social with friends and family because they don't play Pokémon GO, but I am now more willing to socialise with people I don't know who are playing the game at the same locations that I am’ (Loveday and Burgess, 2017). 

 

Loveday and Burgess’ research can be backed up by similar testimonies from interviews that were conducted by Ahmad (2017), with people mentioning online groups forming on Facebook and Twitter, other players running into strangers also playing and making new friends, and common locations drawing large numbers of people for specific things such as gyms and Pokémon. Another interviewee talked about how being in the same team with friends meant they could work together to compete with the other two teams for gyms in their area (Ahmad, 2017). These findings are also supported by Ruiz-Ariza, Casuso, Suarez-Manzano, and Martínez-López (2017), where they point out that adolescent players studied form better social relationships than those that don’t play, play together and are more motivated to go outside, and also suggest that (with more research) the game could be used by schools and families to improve daily physical activity.

 

There are, of course, problems to playing this game, from which I can recall through personal experience. Back at home in the Mt Roskill, there were less stops, and it was far quieter. Very few of my friends at home played, and so I was often solo, as a person on Team Mystic, which ultimately proved frustrating. I moved via walking and public transport but there was a group of Valor players who – judging by their names popping up as far away as Three Kings, and often in the central city as well – operated via car, always knocking down the few gyms in my area and topping them all with Dragonites (I played way back before the gym rework, when the Pokémon on a gym didn’t have to be unique. Today’s gym rework is far more player-friendly). It was very discouraging towards a new player like myself (especially as I didn’t have many Mystic players to help me – it seemed that my area was predominantly Valor) and I quit out of frustration several weeks later. Admittedly, Nintendo has rectified the Dragonite issue and made gyms far more interactive so you don’t get locked out simply for being too low a level to compete, as well as encouraging more cross-team cooperation. I have recently reinstalled Pokémon Go, though it’s a bit late for that now – another mobile game has already captured much of my attention and time. Still, it’s my opinion that Pokémon Go was a combination of nostalgia, AR, and social interaction, which ultimately makes it still widely-played today.

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References

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Ahmad, A. (2017). Pokemon Go - what is behind the hype? (Master’s Thesis, Auckland University of Technology). Retrieved from http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/handle/10292/11518, Tuesday June 5 2018

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Loveday, P., Burgess, J. (2017). Flow and Pokémon GO: The Contribution of Game Level, Playing Alone, and Nostalgia to the Flow State. e-Journal of Social & Behavioural Research in Business, 8(2), 16-28. Retrieved from http://www.ejsbrb.org/upload/e-JSBRB_Loveday_Burgess_8(2)_2017.pdf

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Niantic, Nintendo. (2016). Pokémon Go. Retrieved from https://www.pokemongo.com/en-au/, Tuesday June 5 2018

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Ruiz-Ariza, A., Casuso, R.A., Suarez-Manzano, S., Martínez-López, E.J. (2018). Effect of augmented reality game Pokémon GO on cognitive performance and emotional intelligence in adolescent young. Computers & Education, 116, 49-63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2017.09.002