The emergent potential of mundane media: Playing Pokémon GO in Badalona,Spain

Introduction

In the months of July and August 2016, tens of millions of people downloaded the augmented reality (AR) game Pokémon GO onto their iOS and Android devices. The unprecedented popularity of the game attracted both positive and negative debates – on one hand, some suggested that the game encouraged social inclusion and exercise (Hjorth and Richardson, 2017) and yet, for others, it worked to amplify racial inequities and practices of digital exclusion in the form of redlining – that is, reinforcing inbuilt biases around lower socio-economic geographic areas (Salen Tekinbaş, 2017). Three years after its launch, such debates have largely subsided and the game, though still popular, is now considered somewhat passé. In the rapid cycle of obsolescence typical of mobile apps and games, Pokémon GO is now mundane media. This, we argue, is when it becomes interesting in terms of critically interpreting the effects of everyday media use. More specifically, in this article we suggest that Pokémon GO is one example of the way habitual and sedimented media practices – those that are already embedded in daily life routines and typical scenarios of use – can become possible conduits for informal care, wellbeing and social change through playful inclusion and connection.

For many people games offer a space for sociality, play and care. The role of games for informal modes of care is especially apparent in locative, place-based games such as Pokémon GO. In its second iteration – in which player cooperation has been explicitly designed into the game – the coalescence of social interaction and physical activity has become a key feature of play. The 2017 introduction of multiplayer raid battles – which enables up to 20 players to work together to fight in-game ‘bosses’ at geolocative gym sites and capture rare game resources – was a deliberate modification by developer Niantic to ‘get players back outside and working together’ (Webster, 2017). That is, players work cooperatively to compete against the game (not each other). Of particular interest to our research on the quotidian affordances of mobile media, this version of Pokémon GO has seen significant uptake by older adults, giving us insight into intergenerational play as well as emergent relations between mobile location-based games and everyday practices of self-care and sociality. In this article, we focus on ethnographic fieldwork with players conducted in Badalona (Spain) between 2018 and 2019, to reflect upon the effects of Pokémon GO as a vehicle for playful social interaction and pedestrian wayfaring for older adults. As we suggest, while presenting some challenges relating to physical mobility and mobile game literacy, in weaving together the important role of place and movement in practices of belonging – as well as incorporating social inclusion and collaboration as part of its strategic game play – Pokémon GO can play a role in enhancing the wellbeing of older adults.

To explore the possibilities of Pokémon GO as a modality of urban play for older adults, this article is structured as follows. We begin with a discussion of Pokémon GO as a form of ‘old’ or mundane media, and consider the potential of the game – and mobile media more generally – for everyday practices of digitally mediated care. We then provide a brief overview of digitally mediated eldercare, to highlight the importance of observing older adults’ technology use in situ, if we are to understand the complex and uneven nature of such practices in the context of Pokémon GO. In the final section, we focus on ethnographic fieldwork with Badalona players, examine the haptic and mimetic affordances of mobile games that engender inclusive forms of play especially for older adults and non-expert digital game players, and document some of the less positive effects of Pokémon GO play for our participants.

From new to mundane media: the evolution of Pokémon GO

In the streets of Badalona, it is not uncommon to see a digital wayfarer in the form of a Pokémon GO player. As we have found in our ethnographies of players, the game does not discriminate between age groups – rather, it is often deployed as a conduit for intergenerational communication and play. Sometimes a grandson might teach senior family members how to play, while at other times, it is older players who instruct and co-opt younger friends and relatives. Pokémon GO also generates new rhythms and textures of affect in the quotidian streets of Badalona; mundane trips to the market, for example, can make for a playful encounter with a fellow player. Importantly, as noted above, in terms of its multiplayer affordances the game mechanics of Pokémon GO in its current iteration are intentionally and expansively more collaborative than when it was first released in 2016. As we will describe below, for some players, it has become intimately interwoven with practices of intergenerational care and the daily routines of pedestrian mobility. But first, to better understand these emergent complexities of hybrid play we need to situate the game within the emergence and normalization of mobile location-based games more broadly.

In its first month, Pokémon GO generated more revenue than any other mobile game to date (US$207 million), and at its peak in late 2016 was played by over 45 million people. In mid-2019, it still captured an 84% market share of all location-based games (measured by downloads) and generated around US$4 million per day (Iqbal, 2019; Smith, 2019). It has reportedly been the subject of Facebook and Instagram posts, comments or shares over 1 billion times, and over 110 million friend connections have been made through the game (Smith, 2019). Since its release, the game has popularized the digital overlay technique of AR, in which real-time pedestrian movement is integrated with mobile locative functionality and web-based information, and specific places within the urban environment are populated by interactive virtual objects. This playful phenomenon has been explored and critiqued across a variety of perspectives including wellbeing (the fact that the game encourages pedestrian movement with concomitant positive effects on mental and physical health), the way online games facilitate connection and sharing (highlighting that many games are fundamentally social), and darker debates around racial and socio-economic discrimination, urban safety, and the risks of location-aware mobile media use.

In part, the success of Pokémon GO lies in its coalescence of various technological and cultural trajectories emerging from our playful turn towards a lusory of playful sensibility – or what Raessens (2006) terms the ludification of culture – as we increasingly participate in gameworlds and deploy playful media practices as a way to communicate with each other. Indeed, media and communication research has effectively mobilized play as a key concept for thinking through our mediated interactions; in particular, mobile media and mobile games engender a mode of ambient play, or play that moves with us across social networks, platforms and devices, and betwixt mediated and face-to-face contexts (Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). As an exemplar of large-scale ambient play, Pokémon GO offers a critical lens enabling us as media researchers to focus anew on the role of playful media as an important and integral part of sociality.

As media scholar Chun (2016) reminds us, the impact of new media upon our lifeworlds becomes most interesting when they become mundane, receding from the spotlight and absorbed as part of everyday and habitual rituals of mobility and communication. In the specific context of ageing and technology use, as Dominguez-Rue and Nierling (2016) point out, there is an over-emphasis on digital innovations ‘developed and designed for the elderly’ (p. 11), which overlooks the way everyday household and communication technologies are effectively adapted as solutions by users themselves, precisely because they are already familiar and habitual. In a similar vein, it is our contention here that mobile games and apps – and their effects and affects – are most lastingly transformative when they become interwoven with sedimented collective practices. As the Pokémon GO craze became habitualized or forgotten as ‘old’ media, more compelling phenomena began to emerge with respect to its uptake by middle-aged and elderly adults (Hino et al., 2019). Increasingly, the game has been adopted as a form of mundane media enabling older adults to playfully engage both physically and socially.

The role of AR, virtual reality (VR) and game technologies as a panacea for health solutions has been well documented – especially as innovative multisensorial tools for ageing well and ameliorating against the effects of dementia and phobia (Jakob and Collier, 2017; Hayhurst, 2018). Yet outside these more formal digital health contexts and their focus on designing new services and applications, we suggest that there is largely untapped potential in more informal practices of intergenerational and self-care through mobile media, via the social and embodied affordances of ‘old’ games like Pokémon GO. Against the backdrop of digital health instrumentalism in which new media apps promise a silver bullet solution, we want to explore the power of mundane mobile media and games as part of the informal infrastructures of familial and intimate sociality, and as significant and effective conduits of mediated care. Moreover, as our study shows, we can learn from the lived experiences of such modalities of play through ethnographic approaches. That is, in the process of becoming normalized and thus mundane, what scenarios of use does Pokémon GO offer for older non-gamers, and what new possibilities are consequently opened up for sociality and informal wellbeing practices?

Digitally mediated eldercare and Pokémon GO

Literature on older adults and technology – especially games – has been relatively recent (Sawchuk and Crow, 2011), and research on the role of technology for social inclusion has complicated simplistic debates around technology being viewed as merely positive or negative in effect. Key interdisciplinary ethnographic work in the area – that marries human–computer interaction, science and technology studies, social gerontology and sociology – has focussed on lived experience approaches that acknowledge the complex ways technology, sociality and care can operate in everyday contexts (Neves and Vetere, 2019; Waycott et al., 2019). Kong and Woods (2018) argue that older adults are distinct from other marginalized populations because they have not grown up habituated to digital technologies, and suggest that a critical study of this uniqueness can benefit from ‘in-depth and in-situ understanding’ (p. 2) of the ways elderly people actually use technology in their everyday lives. Such interdisciplinary mappings of older adults’ uneven literacies seek to critically interpret the socio-cultural dimensions of technology as conduits of mediated informal care (Neves and Vetere, 2019).

For Waycott et al. (2019), understanding older adults’ technology practices can be usefully framed in terms of social connectedness. Drawing from the field of social gerontology, they discuss three interrelated areas – personal relationships, community connections and societal engagement. Waycott et al. (2019) argue that technology can play a role in enriching these facets of everyday communicative life. Recognizing that technologies are uneven in their effects and roles, Waycott et al. suggest that technologies can be designed to enrich social connectedness for older adults across those three areas if lived experience is integrated into the design. As Rosales and Fernandez-Ardevol (2019) note in their study of older adults, smartphones offer meaningful pathways for diverse modes of connection. Their study in Spain from 2014 to 2017 demonstrated some of the multiple ways older adults engaged with smartphones for social inclusion and informal care. Building on these studies, this article acknowledges that the diversity of older adults’ lived experience of technology and mobile games is frequently and significantly motivated by a desire for social connectedness.

In game studies, the increasingly important role of older adults as key players of games have debunked myths about games being just for young people (Brown, 2012; Brown and De Schutter, 2016; De Schutter, 2011; De Schutter et al., 2014). In particular, the motivations for older adults to engage with games often relates to social inclusion (especially strengthening intergenerational and familial ties) and exercise (Sayago et al., 2016). As Sayago et al. (2016) note in their empirical research with older adult game players, the playful ways games allow for different forms of sociality and social inclusion often motivate older adults to upskill in technologies. In their Pokémon GO play, the motivations of our Badalona participants complexly comingled the pleasures of mobile touchscreen play, friendship, intergenerational sociality and an enhanced sense of wellbeing. Yet through in situ observation, we also noted that these effects were uneven, as some were less habituated to the gestural literacy skills required of mobile touchscreen use, while others were exposed to physical risk by the unfamiliar distractedness of playing-while-walking.

The potential social and wellbeing dimensions of mobile location-based games have been the subject of numerous studies. Pokémon GO, in particular, has been explored as a vehicle for intergenerational literacy, sharing and informal health practices (Lindqvist et al., 2018; Militello et al., 2018; Vella et al., 2019). As Althoff et al. (2016) note, games like Pokémon GO encourage physical activity as part of the game play, and increased exercise has been documented particularly in low-activity participants (Althoff et al., 2016; Hino et al., 2019). Hino et al. (2019), for example, conducted a 10-month ethnographic study in Yokohama (Japan) to investigate the ways Pokémon GO was used by middle-aged and older adults as part of their exercise routines. In another clinical study in Japan, Kato et al. (2017) examined how Pokémon GO encouraged patients suffering hikikomori (a severe form of social isolation that can involve years of living in one room) to venture outside. Here the game allows players to enter a re-visioned world-as-playground mediated by the screen, engaging with familiar routines of gameplay in public places previously perceived as risky or strange.

Yet while Pokémon GO play may encourage physical activity for otherwise sedentary people, it does not necessarily remedy the problem of social isolation within the culturally specific context of Japan, as users may play near one another without communicating. As one participant in the Kato et al. study noted ‘Most people are independently staring at their own individual screens in parks. We Japanese, unlike Westerners, don’t chat with strangers!’ (Kato et al., 2017). Hikikomori has often been associated with the negative effects of videogaming; the condition appeared at the same time videogames became popular in Japan. It also emerged at the end of the economic downturn during the late 1980s, in which the salaried tradition of employment ceased to be a secure career option for men. As psychotherapists note (Kato et al., 2017), although using AR games like Pokémon GO may encourage people to overcome physical seclusion through the familiar tropes of games and gameplay, such interventions must be employed in conjunction with other techniques that foster sociality.

Kato et al’.s study resonates with Jeanette Pols’ (2012) findings – that digital interventions aimed at enhancing the lives of older adults only work when conducted in unison with face-to-face or co-located interaction. As Pols notes in her book Care at a Distance, the ‘closeness of technology’ needs to be centred around a diversity of prosocial practices. While Pols’ study was conducted in formal care settings, the use of mobile media in more informal contexts can be seen as an extension of mediated care. This echoes other work in mobile media research that considers how networked media interfaces can extend and enhance, rather than replace, co-located social interaction, such as studies on the informal uses of technologies enacted by families, in which intergenerational connections are enhanced through digital play (Sinanan and Hjorth, 2018).

Pols’ work is useful in conceptualizing how care is enacted and mediated in contemporary life, allowing us to see and interpret the tacit, informal and mundane ways in which mobile media does often-invisible care work in everyday intimate relations. Mobile apps have now become a mundane part of self and familial care – from apps for carers of older people (Berridge and Wetle, 2020) and wearable devices for promoting health and fitness (Lupton, 2016) to robotic technologies for care in elderly care homes (Robinson et al., 2014). As Lupton (2021) suggests, mundane media and mobile apps can play an important role in the rhythms of intergenerational informal care, and understanding these complex and dynamic assemblages in which the digital, social and cultural dimensions entwine is important for articulating the manifold and often-tacit forms of mediated care.

In these contexts, mobile games are also becoming increasingly embedded in the everyday lives of older adults – from solitary games to multiplayer and location-based games, such as Pokémon GO. For many, they are an integral part of daily practices of sociality, such that playfulness becomes intimately entangled with practices of connectedness, self-care and wellbeing. The relative success of Pokémon GO as a form of digital-material play among and between older adults and their families invites us to consider the significance and unrealized potential of an established and embedded mobile platform, and how it can become part of routines of pedestrian movement and patterns of social intergenerational interaction, facilitating informal modalities of self-care and personalized wellbeing activities (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

A Pokémon GO play session in Badalona, Spain.

Badalona: an ethnographic study

Our ethnographic study was conducted in Badalona over a 3-month period in late 2018–early 2019, and focussed on older adults’ Pokémon GO play and their experience of the mobile haptic interface. Badalona has declining birth rates and a growing ageing population (18% are aged over 65) that is predominantly cared for by familial networks. The fieldwork, carried out by two researchers experienced and trained in ethnographic observation, drew from techniques common to digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016; Richardson and Hjorth, 2017) whereby the coalescence of digital, material and social practices are mapped through methods such as participant observation, walkthroughs, re-enactments and interviews. We focussed on three ethnographic techniques – scenarios of use, in-depth interviews and re-enactments.

Scenarios of use involved observing participants’ experience of the mobile touchscreen’s haptic interface and modalities of play, and identifying various ‘scenarios’ that typified older adults’ Pokémon GO play. One of the researchers, a frequent player in the Pokémon GO community in Badalona, sought permission for us to join one group of 20 participants on several Pokémon GO raids (where they cooperatively challenged a legendary ‘boss’ at specific gym sites), allowing us to watch, listen and take fieldnotes as they ‘walked and talked’ their play practices. Conversations with researchers and between players provided a reflexive narrative of the gameplay as it unfolded. Following this, through one-on-one interviews with four key participants selected as representative of different user scenarios, we explored the social and embodied dimensions of play more deeply. During the interview, participants guided the researcher through a typical day, re-enacted aspects of their mobile media use, and responded to research questions aimed at eliciting their perceptions and embodied experiences of the gameplay. The interviews were recorded in participants’ first language (Catalonian and Spanish), and subsequently translated into English by one of the researchers who is a Catalonian native.

Our interpretation of the data applies a similar approach to ethnographic analysis as described by Berry (2017) in her work on creative practice and mobile media use. For Berry, vignettes are a way of ‘braiding’ composite accounts of participant experience together (2017: xv; Markham, 2012), and are particularly useful in narrating the collective perceptions and ‘doings’ of a particular cohort. While no part of our interpretive analysis is fictionalized, the stories we tell provide an experiential ‘feel’ that reflect typical scenarios and experiences of our player-participants.

Pokémon GO in Badalona: haptic, social and intergenerational play

Sofia is a 67-year-old widow and nurse who has lived in the Catalonian town of Badalona all her life. After losing her husband to cancer a decade ago, Sofia initially found it hard to overcome her grief and depression. Her daughters and grandchildren have helped in this transition. In particular, Sofia is especially close to her 7-year-old grandson, Diego. They do many activities together, constantly sharing intergenerational skills, and it was Diego who first introduced Sofia to Pokémon GO. As they walked the streets of Badalona together, he would show her the digital overlays and virtual objects perceived through the game, and how to flick the haptic screen to capture Pokémon, effectively reinventing Sofia’s everyday experiences of familiar and mundane spaces. After playing together in the beachside streets of Badalona, Diego asked her to collect them while he was at school. And so Sofia did.

Before long, Sofia began to enjoy playing the game herself, so she opened her own Pokémon GO account. She would wander the streets catching Pokémon, and trips to the market or shops became Pokémon GO adventures in which she would navigate alternative routes so as to encounter more of the virtual creatures. In effect, Sofia became a digital wayfarer (Hjorth and Pink, 2014). A term coined by Hjorth and Pink, digital wayfaring adapts Tim Ingold’s (2011) work to convey how digital online networks of information and communication become imbricated and habituated in our movement through urban space. As we move from place to place, Ingold argued, we develop an embodied sense of knowing and being in the world – that is, we literally and dynamically make meaning as we walk and travel through the environment. Today, our knowledge and experience of place is augmented by an increasing array of geo-locative mobile apps, and thus simultaneously material and digital. In AR games, such as Pokémon GO, the experience of digital wayfaring is further compounded, as locations are transformed into sites of collaborative and competitive play, publicness as a mode of engaging with familiar strangers is reimagined (Woods, 2019), and familiar terrain – our own homes, neighbourhoods and cities – are remade into playspaces.

Throughout our study of Pokémon GO players in Badalona, it also became clear that the uptake of Pokémon GO by elderly populations points to the importance of taking haptic play seriously. Like many mobile touchscreen games, Pokémon GO is fundamentally mimetic; that is, the gameplay calls upon or simulates our embodied memory of familiar actions and real-world physics, such as throwing a ball, and ideally such games are designed so that they can be grasped immediately and intuitively rather than requiring specific expertise. A number of researchers have described the pleasure and intimacy of mimetic mobile gameplay (Keogh, 2018; Richardson and Hjorth, 2017), and this is also true of Pokémon GO; the game demands particular haptic gestures (e.g. the flicking of the PokéBall or tagging PokéStops) that invite the knowing body to translate lived experience to the medium of the screen. As grandmother Sofia described, once her grandson had taught her some basics about playing the game, she enjoyed the ways in which her corporeal experience of the ‘real world’ could be adapted into Pokémon GO gameplay via the haptic screen; her phone would shudder when she came near PokéStops – the game is literally ‘felt’ through the body.

As a location-based AR game, Pokémon GO play is also felt through the body in another way – by embedding pedestrian mobility and co-located player interaction into the game’s mechanics. As Apperley and Moore (2019) insightfully observe, in networked and locative touchscreen games such as Pokémon GO, the haptic effects generate a kind of ‘affective resonance’, or a shared and empathic connection to other bodies; that is, the ‘shared experience of touch, gesture, comportment and movement that is established and structured through the playful enactment of the Pokémon GO app . . . [establishes] a wider and dispersed collective affinity and co-presence’ (p. 7). Referring to Hjorth and Richardson’s work (2014, 2020), Apperley and Moore note that this ‘haptic effect’ is a key dimension of the ambient play afforded by the game.

It is not by accident that haptic games like Pokémon GO are being taken up by a broad spectrum of players including the elderly, as the haptic and location-aware functionalities effectively privilege mimetic touch and physical mobility (rather than the audiovisuality typical of many media interfaces), and the experience of playing becomes literally corporealized as a novel remaking of the urban environment, in conjunction with the new communicative possibilities of mobile play. By coalescing multisensorial modes of embodied perception, Pokémon GO play illustrates the possibilities of AR touchscreen games for generating new ways of being in the world through haptic screen cultures.

Yet while the mimetic and haptic qualities of mobile games render them easy to play, some of our older adult participants were challenged and at times frustrated by the gestural literacy and skillset required for adept navigation of the mobile touchscreen. When challenging a raid boss, players are provided a limited number of PokéBalls, which means it is important to throw what the game calls a ‘curve ball’, performed by skilfully flicking the ball with a finger to land a positive shot on a moving target. Shots are rated by the game (as ‘bad’, ‘nice’, ‘great’ and ‘excellent’) – the better the shot or curve ball, the higher the chances of success in defeating the boss. While younger players typically master this skill early on, some of our older participants found this intricate gesture all but impossible and achieved little success. To continue playing, they confessed to spending ‘real’ money (buying Poké coins) to purchase additional Raid Passes. Like many mobile games, Pokémon GO is a ‘freemium’ game – free to play with upgrades and game resources purchasable via micro-transactions. Here, there is clearly a sense in which the game capitalizes on the embodied vulnerabilities and motile hand-to-screen limitations of inexpert older players. Yet at the same time, as described by Sofia and others, to overcome these challenges, some participants deliberately sought the help of local youngsters (and their own children and grandchildren), fostering moments of intergenerational co-play and familial connection.

Both despite – and because of – these challenges, for Sofia, as with most of the older adult participants we observed, Pokémon GO afforded a playful sociality. When Sofia began playing Pokémon GO, she attempted to join gym raids and engage in gym battles, but not knowing the strategy, would lose every time. Then she started to notice other players at the sites where gyms and PokéStops were placed; they were young and old, male and female. Initially, Sofia said she felt shy and self-conscious meeting players. But then, over time and through the playful and social affordances of the game, she began to recognize regular players. They would stop and talk to share techniques, strategies and stories about boss raids, and bond over their enjoyment of the game, such that the gameplay became woven into the fabric of their social lives and daily routines. As Sofia commented:

I was feeling alone and spending a lot of time at home since my husband passed away. Somehow the situation was consuming me both mentally and physically. But after I started playing, I can say the game has brought me back to the streets; I have met a lot of people through Pokémon GO with whom I go and have a coffee or even dinner. I sometimes cook cakes and bring them when we have a big meet-up. Physically I now feel stronger than in the past years, and I walk about 30,000 steps per day.

Soon, Sofia learnt how to fight collaboratively and win. In the beginning she and other players would organize meet-ups via WhatsApp, but the platform was unable to accommodate the large groups that were constantly changing, so they started using Telegram, which enables thousands of players to share stories and coordinate the times and locations of meet-ups. Over the period of our study in Badalona, data extracted from the Telegram meet-up bot revealed the prolific extent of player connections generated through the app; during 2018, there were almost 29,000 unique players involved in nearly 6500 raids, and collectively over 12,500 km walked.

Sofia now has a Pokémon GO bracelet (the Pokémon GO Plus) which allows her to collect Pokémon without needing to constantly attend to the mobile screen (Figure 2). In the mornings, she collects the balls and hatches eggs as she walks thousands of steps. In the afternoons, after a rest, Sofia ventures out for more social Pokémon GO meet-ups. She delights in her acquired mastery of the technology and the way in which Pokémon GO brings different people together in a fun and playful way. She feels fit and socially engaged in her community, and has become a super-cool grandmother in the eyes of her grandson, Diego. Sofia’s story is not exceptional. Rather, she tells an increasingly common narrative, one that shows us how existing or mundane technologies are incidentally repurposed as informal enactments of intergenerational care, self-care and quotidian wellbeing.

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Figure 2.

Sofia getting ready to catch some Pokémon.

At the Pokémon GO gym gatherings we also met Mateo, who carried two smartphones – his own device and the other belonging to his mom. Mateo and his mom use Pokémon GO as a way to stay connected in playful ways. Sometimes, they go to meet-ups together, but at other times, when his mom feels less mobile (she is in her seventies), Mateo plays for her. While much is written about ‘parallel play’ in terms of early childhood development (Piaget, 1954), there is something to be said for this activity in adult sociality – especially in terms of how mobile media encourage various modalities of intimate co-presence. Within media and communication scholarship, co-presence is usually understood as a form of mediated connection, a way of being-with-others through and across online networks. Matsuda (2009), for example, explores the concept of co-presence in his investigation of the mobile phone as a ‘mum in the pocket’. Yet here, in Mateo’s act of playing-for another by temporarily taking embodied control of his mom’s mobile device, we see another variation of mediated intimacy and familial support achieved via a mundane mobile game.

Another of our participants, 36-year-old Santiago, lives with his mother, with whom he has a very close relationship, especially as Santiago’s father left when Santiago was young. Santiago has played Pokémon GO since it first launched and hasn’t stopped since, and more recently encouraged his mother to play with him on their daily walks. As he describes:

My mother started playing Pokémon GO when she realized that it was a way to kill time. In addition to having the dogs to walk, she is a little overweight and it was fun exercise. She initially thought it was nonsense, since she is 70, but then she liked it more and we used it to stay out longer together. She accompanies me many times; even though she is in charge of the dogs in the mornings, the reality is that many evenings she comes with me and we play together.

Here, we see Santiago and his mother enacting another instance of intergenerational play with consequential social and physical health benefits. As Pokémon GO rewards walking as a way to incubate Pokémon eggs – the more distance covered the more Pokémon can be hatched – this dimension of the gameplay has become seamlessly integrated into their everyday life practices.

Many of the elderly and retired participants in the group meet-up sessions spoke of the physical benefits of Pokémon GO, in terms of how it motivated them to change their exercise routines: ‘I manage my grandsons’ accounts even though they don’t really play anymore – it’s an excuse to walk by the beach, watch the sea and attack some Poké gyms!’; ‘My doctor recommended that I exercise more and the game gave me a reason to do so – now I can walk the stairs and not lose my breath!’

While most of the older adults we observed spoke of the positive effects their Pokémon GO play has had on their physical health, muscle strength and stamina, following our study, one participant hurt her leg and became temporarily home-bound after she tripped and fell during a boss raid. Much has been written in popular media and research scholarship about the dangers of mobile phone engagement in public spaces (and particularly immersive AR games like Pokémon GO), as users are distracted by the screen and inattentive to the traffic, pedestrians and other objects in the built urban environment (Sabelman and Lam, 2015). Older adults are perhaps particularly vulnerable to these risks, due in part to the bodily frailty and sense of precarity that comes with moving about in old age, and also because the dynamics of attention–distraction demanded of mobile media in pedestrian contexts is a new kind of motion literacy that can only be acquired through ongoing and habitual use.

Interestingly, the uptake of Pokémon GO by older adults in Badalona has been recognized by their innovative healthcare system centralized through the city council and operationalized through their public healthcare organization, Badalona Serveis Assistencials (BSA). The game is now recommended by social workers as a way for older adults to enhance two key dimensions of ageing well – exercise and social inclusion. Over the period of our ethnographic research, we interviewed José, a social worker at BSA, to capture his insights as a care service provider. José is a long-time fan of Pokémon GO, having played many iterations of Pokémon games across multiple platforms throughout his childhood and into adulthood. However, what José especially enjoyed about the mobile AR version was that it enticed people out of their homes and into the streets, and in particular, the way gym raids helped to build collaboration and dialogue between players. He described how over the past year he had assisted nurse practitioners and clients with some basic mobile media literacy and introduced them to Pokémon GO; one of these clients now organizes social meet-ups with people she has met through the game, providing her with more choices for staying socially connected.

As José and his team continued to explore how Pokémon GO could be incorporated as part of their general social services, over time, the game became ‘a practice fully integrated into our DNA’ – not just within his social services centre, but also throughout the BSA primary care centres. BSA now run clinical sessions every afternoon that incorporate Pokémon GO for interested users, where they provide assistance with technology use and the game’s rules and mechanics. This allows people to gather together over a common interest and activity that emphasizes wellbeing and playful sociality rather than focussing on issues of health and isolation. As José noted:

To (our) surprise, we learnt of other centre professionals who were also players of Pokémon GO, even some of them that had started to refer their patients to the game . . . There are a lot of cases where playing this game has greatly improved the inclusion of people with difficulties relating socially in a safe way. The game allows people to fight against social exclusion or isolation. We also know about clients with depression who are very locked in at home but they come to the streets and interact with people because of the Pokémon GO raids that are core to the game play . . . Increasingly we see elderly users with a mobile using Pokémon GO or even with the Pokémon GO bracelet out hunting the Pokémon . . . Currently there is a Pokémon GO Badalona group on Telegram which has more than 1,000 people and many of these people did not know each other before they connected through the game. Pokémon GO encourages a collective resilience, as people need to work together to succeed in the game.

As cities continue to grow with ageing populations that increasingly live alone, José and the BSA are not alone in their concern for how people can be supported, particularly in terms of social inclusion. José also described the BSA programme Neighbours by Neighbours – a micro-activist initiative that empowers community members to take care of each other, and how Pokémon GO is playing a key role in the articulation of the programme, as elderly players can keep a friendly eye on each other. In this programme, José and his colleagues have recruited two or three older people playing in the neighbourhood, along with each of their primary care centres, to create an informal social system of ‘careful’ surveillance. In this way, a sedimented and mundane mobile game that is embedded in the everyday activities of their community members has become effectively insinuated into the institutional provision of care, largely successful because it was easily accommodated into daily routines of sociality and play.

As recounted by José and our participants, Pokémon GO gaming reveals an array of experiential play modalities that are enabled by the haptic, interactive and locative capacities of mobile touchscreen games. While there are certainly challenges for older adults in terms of acquiring and mastering mobile haptic literacies, and risks posed for less able bodies not habituated to simultaneously navigating screens and pedestrian spaces while on-the-move, there are also significant benefits. We would argue that the positive social and corporeal effects we have documented here are authentic and potentially enduring precisely because the gameworld is already established as part of collective intergenerational media practices and augmentively ‘realized’ in the urban environment, and because the gameplay fits easily into the rhythms and patterns of daily life. Here, haptic mobile media, digital wayfaring and location-based AR gaming come together as people adopt inventive approaches to informal care practices.

Conclusion

In this article, we have suggested that by critically interpreting the uptake of a ‘mundane’ mobile game through an ethnographic analysis of lived experience we can better understand the possibilities of location-based play for everyday routines of informal wellbeing and care. Rather than perpetuate stereotypes about old people and new media illiteracies, this article sought to highlight the ways in which mobile games can be used by older adults in ways that enhance social inclusion and wellbeing. Indeed, the role of haptic and mobile technologies is especially significant when it comes to vulnerable agencies and inexpert digital media users. As we argued, mobile games that rely on touch-based interaction are fundamentally mimetic and do not require expert gameplay skills, technological know-how or advanced digital literacies. For the most part, they are easily accommodated into our everyday corporeal schematics and sensorial know-how, even for those with relatively low digital, mobile and game literacy skills.

More broadly, through observing our participants’ collaborative urban play practices and telling their stories, we have shown how mobile location-based and AR games present a spectrum of affordances: hybrid modalities of experience (through the coalescence of digital, networked and physical ways of knowing); digital wayfaring (as this hybrid experience generates a new kind of collective place-making); haptic play (through the tactile intimacy of the touchscreen and ‘feel’ of the game); ambient play (as the game becomes diffused through the embodied routines of everyday life) and social play (via the embedment of collaborative action in the game’s mechanics).

As the lived experiences of our participants reveal, it is important that we observe and understand the daily routines and authentic technology uses of people in situ, and focus more carefully on the existing and emerging sociotechnical strategies that users deploy for ageing well, rather than simply intervening reactively with new technologies and apps. Understanding and interpreting locative mobile media use in particular must account for material, social and embodied experience within and alongside which the online and digital are situated. That is, such research must be ethnographically and contextually informed – gleaned from the critical observation of actual practices – if we are to effectively capture the often unintentional, contingent and ad hoc aspects of quotidian mobile media practices. Such modes of data collection authentically disclose people’s lived experience in everyday life, their localized sensory encounters with place and affective engagement with others, both situated and mediated. We can learn a lot from ‘old’ or existing media experiences like those afforded by Pokémon GO, and how they can be reinvented or adopted anew by different cohorts, demonstrating the need to discern embodied habitudes of sociotechnical practice and their informal or incidental benefits.

More recently, as we have seen the impact of the coronavirus playing out unevenly across the world, the role of network and mobile media for informal care and social inclusion has become even more significant. Physical distancing, restrictions on urban movement and the imperative to stay at home has seen the rhythms of intergenerational digital and social play being recalibrated. Playing and talking together through screens can help to bond and connect – rather than distance – people between and across generations. In these new scenarios of use, it is mundane media interfaces and practices – audio and video calls on computers and phones, casual network play through online games – that allows us to support social inclusion and re-enact tacit forms of informal care, for friends, families and the community. Now more than ever, it is crucial that we critically understand and interpret the implications, significance and possibilities of mundane media, and the manifold ways we embody and enact quotidian media practices.