Pokémon Go as an HRG: Mobility,sociability,and surveillance in hybrid spaces

In July 2016, Niantic Labs, the same creators of Ingress (2012; https://www.ingress.com/), released the hybrid reality game (HRG) Pokémon Go (http://www.pokemongo.com/). Due to the game’s sudden success, many mobile users all over the world for the first time could experience playing an HRG. HRGs, however, are not new. For at least 15 years, researchers and artists have experimented with the affordances of location-based technology to create playful experiences that take place across physical and digital (hybrid) spaces. Yet for a long time, these games had a very limited target audience. Previous research has identified three main HRGs’ design elements: mobility, sociability, and spatiality (de Souza e Silva, 2009); and three properties that deserve analysis: the connection between play and ordinary life, the relevance of the play community, and surveillance (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2008). With HRGs’ commercialization and popularity, we need to further investigate the social and spatial issues that have been at the core of these games for over a decade. Pokémon Go is an example of an HRG that highlights the main issues that arise when these games become mainstream: mobility, sociability, spatiality, and surveillance.

In 2001, Blast Theory developed the world’s first HRG, Can You See Me Now? (http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/), which was groundbreaking at that time. Set up like Pac-Man, street players equipped with walkie-talkies, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and global positioning system (GPS) devices had to catch online players, represented on a 2D map of the city displayed on their PDAs. This was the first time a game could be simultaneously played in digital and physical spaces, and required players to actually move around to play. Can You See Me Now? was so cutting-edge that it has been extensively analyzed, and performed all over the world for more than a decade. Still, the game was popular among artists and academics, but largely unknown to the general public.

A few years later, in 2003, another HRG was released in Tokyo: Mogi, a treasure hunt game in which players had to catch, with their phones, virtual objects and creatures that lived in specific locations in the city. Licoppe and Inada (2006) explain how players went on expeditions to certain parts of the city to collect virtual objects, which were location and time sensitive. Players would also often change their route to work to collect more creatures and objects. Thirteen years later, Pokémon Go includes several elements from these pioneer HRGs: (1) It takes place simultaneously in physical and digital spaces; (2) players are represented in a 3D map of the city, and can see virtual objects (Pokémon, Pokéstops, and Gyms) on their phone screens, but need to be walking around physical space to actually catch them; and (3) Pokémon Go is also played with location-aware technology.

HRGs are mobile activities, so players need to move around to play the game. They are social activities, so cooperation is a crucial part of HRGs. Finally, they expand the game outside the traditional game space (the board or the screen) by merging physical and digital spaces. Pokémon Go is no exception. Players need to walk around to find Pokémon. Because the game is so popular, it is very common to see other players around the city. Lastly, Pokémon Go is played in hybrid spaces—mobile spaces that emerge from the combination of physical and digital spaces, along with the social use of location-aware technology (de Souza e Silva, 2006). A new and innovative feature of Pokémon Go is its augmented reality component. Unlike previous HRGs, Pokémon Go allows users to see Pokémon through their mobile screens superimposed on the actual physical environment. This promotes a stronger connection with physical space and highlights the fact that urban spaces are the playing field. However, although Pokémon Go resembles older HRGs, it also lacks many HRG elements.

One goal of every HRG is to strengthen the connections between play and life, that is, to highlight the fact that life is inherently playful. Playful experiences in HRGs emerge from the layering of spaces and the social connection among players. Pokémon Go allows players to move in and out of the game, making city space and game space blurred and complementary. However, while Pokémon Go does happen in hybrid spaces, players lack agency to modify the hybrid game space, and socialize with each other within the game. Yes, players can put down “lures” in locations to attract other Pokémon and therefore other players to specific locations. They can meet each other if they congregate in a physical spot. But a player cannot see other players on the screen, which eliminates the possibility of onscreen encounters (Licoppe & Inada, 2006). True, there are huge online communities of interest on Facebook, Reddit, and other social media talking about the game, adding an additional social layer to the game in online spaces. But social interaction in hybrid spaces is still limited. In addition, the development of a hybrid play community is limited because players can neither chat with each other in the game nor create in-game content. This is inherently different from other HRGs, such as Ingress, which allows users to communicate and create portals. Portals in Ingress highlight for players relevant landmarks and characteristics of physical environments (Stark, 2016), and Pokémon Go Pokéstops were mostly adopted from Ingress’ portals. But except for that, in-game content creation in Pokémon Go barely exists (yet). Since play is an intrinsic social activity that emerges from the relationships between players, and players’ agency in game space, Pokémon Go still has some room for development as an HRG.

Lastly, HRGs rely on surveillance. In some games, such as in Blast Theory’s I Like Frank (2004; http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/i-like-frank/), surveillance is a positive quality of the game, because users have to be surveilled to accomplish the game’s goal, which is to follow the instructions of an online player to find Frank’s physical office. In other games, like Mogi, collateral surveillance has been described as creepy. Licoppe and Inada (2006) describe a case of “power asymmetry” in the game where one player claimed to see another in the physical world, but the reverse was not true. Pokémon Go players, however, do not engage in collateral surveillance, because they do not interact directly with each other through the game. This does not exclude, however, common fears about locational privacy and top-down surveillance that have been raised about the game. For example, in July 2016 the media announced that Niantic Labs had full access to the Google accounts of some iPhone players who signed up for the game, meaning Google could see and modify users emails, payment information, etc. (Peterson, 2016). This “glitch” was quickly fixed, but Pokémon Go players are still subject to other kinds of personal information collection, such as where players have been, for how long, and their travel speed (NYU Center for Data Science, 2016). And, just like with other location-based apps, most users are unaware that they are sharing this kind of location information.

HRGs influence players’ mobility through urban spaces, increasing the potential to connect with other players nearby, and making people experience urban spaces as hybrid spaces. While the current version of Pokémon Go does lack a few of these characteristics, especially the sociability component, it surpassed all previous HRGs in popularity and number of players. Almost instantly, the game became famous all over the world. While previous HRGs were mostly confined to the domains of research and art, Pokémon Go represents the ultimate commodification of these types of games. On the one hand, it is exciting that the world has finally found out about the possibility of experiencing hybrid spaces. On the other hand, its popularity brings to our attention issues of locational privacy and large-scale personal information collection that is inserted into the logics of big data. Future studies should look at not only the mobile, social, and spatial aspects of HRG, but at how these games now contribute to personal data collection (including locational information) at rates that were unimaginable thirteen years ago.