The Collapse of the “Real”: Pokémon Go and Not-So-Virtual Gaming

Jean Baudrillard had a fascination with the “real.” Is Disneyland real? It’s a physical place, sure. You can pack your family up, get into a plane, land, spend your hard earned money, see princesses, go on ride. But in another sense, it is also a simulation. It is a simulation of a simulation in fact, with characters, places, and princesses that never really existed. Princesses were brought into reality by Disney movies, and yet they walk around the (fake?) streets and take pictures with children. Much of Disneyland is meant to look like a street with storefronts circa 1920, a very wholesome and nostalgic feel. While the 1920 streets may have been real, these buildings and shops and streets are both real, you can walk on them, and unreal, they are in a theme park made to look like a historical street. This leads into Baudrillard’s discussion of maps. Maps are a simulation of the land. That shouldn’t be too controversial. But what would happen if a map became too accurate? When does it stop being a map and start being part of the landscape? Let’s say the map gets so detailed the it covers every inch of the earth, representing what’s below it. Eventually it becomes part of the landscape, no?

These are the thoughts I have as I download and play Pokémon Go for the first time. This game needs to be taken very seriously: it has exploded beyond Pokémon fans, beyond mobile gaming fans, beyond even gamers. Several non gamers I know have asked me, “what’s the deal with Pokémon Go? It’s all I’m hearing about.” But even more non gamer friends are playing it. Pokémon Go was released on July 6^th in the United States. On July 7^th it was on more phones than Tinder. But downloading something doesn’t necessarily prove anything. What does show the game’s popularity, however, is that 60% of people who have downloaded it use it daily. In the next two days, it’s projected that Pokémon Go will have more daily active users than Twitter—which is widely considered to be one of the most transformational social media sites that has ever existed. Pokémon Go is already used more than WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, and Messenger. Over 30% of all desktop searches from June 10 to July 7 had the word Pokémon in them. (Statistics found here.) If these statistics don’t convince you that something new and revolutionary is happening here, then I don’t know what will.

So what is happening with Pokémon Go? Why is it becoming so popular so fast? The game itself is being hailed as a major breakthrough for augmented reality (AR). In just days it has become the most popular augmented reality app in history. Pokémon Go‘s predecessor, Ingress (also developed by Niantic), was the birthplace of Pokémon Go. Ingress is a massively multiplayer online location-based game where players capture portals that reside at locations such as monuments, churches, and so on. Ingress has far more functionality than Pokémon Go, though far less popularity. However, it is clear that the functionality of the map is one reason the game is so popular, as relatively few bugs exist in the map.

Another reason for Pokémon Go‘s success is the interface. The interface brings augmented reality literally to your lap, as I found out while I was catching wild Pokémon last night while laying on the couch. The way the game seamlessly uses the functionality of your phone is both shocking and exciting. The first time I opened the game I saw an adorable Charmander sitting on my coffee table. It was simultaneously shocking and comical and exciting. I imagine it’s what Geordie Le Forge feels like when we can see things no one else can. The use of the camera and GPS make the game feel incredibly real, as you can see yourself walking down the street and see Pokémon in your environment.

What I wonder, as this game explodes, is whether or not Pokémon Go has crossed the threshold between game and reality in the mind of the public. Game scholars have long been arguing that our virtual lives are just as real as what we do in the physical realm: we love, we build identities, we work, we can even be raped. For me it’s not a big cognitive leap to think that an AR game has successfully blended the worlds. But what’s even more interesting is to think that the game has blended the worlds for people en mass, people who have no idea who Bonnie Nardi or Julian Dibbell are.

Beyond this, I wonder what the consequences of this virtual/real implosion may be. For example, several teens used the app to lure between 10-12 victims to a remote location in order to rob them. The community nature of the game is one of the most compelling features. Yet this is also its downfall, as this is how the teens lured people into the remote location. Like what happened with the Waze murder, we sometimes get so wrapped up in the possibility of new functionality that we forget to think critically about them.

For Boon Sheridan the game is very real, as he lives in a building that used to be a church that the game made into a gym. His house is now being swarmed with players. Consider if this happened in a stand your ground state, or any state where you’re allowed to shoot trespassers. Sheridan reports that people pull up to his house and idle in front for 5-10 minutes, that many people hang out across the street, and some even walk right up to the driveway. One doesn’t need much of an imagination to see how this could go very wrong very quickly. As Jynx wrote about this week, we need also need to think about the safety of who is playing the game. The article refereed to is “Pokémon Go could be a death sentence for a Black man,” which points out just how dangerous it could be for a person of color to go wandering around holding a phone. The Westboro Baptist Church, which is also a designated gym, is controlled by a Clefairy named LoveIsLove. There are countless pictures floating around of people standing at monuments or museums all on their phones, playing Pokémon Go. The overlap between the game and the physical world has become so prolific that I wonder if you can even call it overlap anymore.

Pokémon Go encourages people to get out, walk, drive, and run to different places, monuments, and locations. In other words, the game almost makes the world more real. Instead of 20 minutes on my elliptical today I’m going to go out for a run to try and catch some new Pokémon. I have many plans to engage more with the physical realm because of this. Even my library at school has become a Pokémon gym and plans to use this to get students in for events. In other words, I guess what I’m wondering is whether Pokémon Go has taken AR games and location-based games from the status of small map to that of a map that covers the world: has Pokémon Go become reality? I think it may have, and I can’t wait to see what that means.