Pokémon Go,the novelty of nostalgia,and the ubiquity of the smartphone

Catch ‘em all, all the time

When Satoshi Tajiri created Pokémon in 1996, he wanted to capture his own experience of exploring the rice fields and rivers of his childhood town to collect insects. In a 1999 interview with Time, Tajiri explained:

Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanization. Kids play inside their homes now, and a lot had forgotten about catching insects . . . When I was making games, something clicked and I decided to make a game with that concept. (“The ultimate game freak,” 1999)

The first Pokémon games, Green Version and Red Version, take this nostalgic, whimsical experience and amplify its significance the way only a young child’s imagination could: a young boy leaves home and walks around the entire country to become, essentially, the best bug collector in the world. Importantly, the games were released on Nintendo’s portable system, the GameBoy. From the start, there was a sense that Pokémon was a game that you took “out there” into the world to share with other players (as McCrea [2017] explores elsewhere in this issue), but also that it was a deeply personal experience: your Pokémon are on your GameBoy.

The game’s slogan highlights its core, ultimate goal: you gotta catch ‘em all. What Surman (2009) highlights as a serial aesthetic is fundamental to the Pokémon experience as players attempt to catch the 150 distinguishable Pokémon creatures through both exploring their own game and trading with other players (an activity encouraged by the fact that collecting all 150 Pokémon was impossible without trading with another player). Through their distinguished visual design (reinforced by the complementing anime series), each of the creatures was memorable and recognisable from silhouette alone (Surman, 2009). Becoming a “Pokémon master” was celebrated not only through becoming virtuosic at playing the game, but by developing extended knowledges of the game and its creatures. Around commercial breaks, the anime would provide a “Who’s that Pokémon?” quiz to test the depth of the viewer’s knowledge. The combination of serial and kawaii aesthetics across a strong transmedia platform turned Tajiri’s nostalgic experience of insect collection into a pop culture phenomenon.

One did not have to play Pokémon to know about it, and so Pokémon was able to transcend being just another videogame franchise. Others have shown how since the late 1980s the “core” videogame genres present on home and portable consoles are marketed to a cultivated and largely hermetic demographic primarily imagined to be male and adolescent (Kirkpatrick, 2012). Action and role-playing genres typically require complex and trained dexterities and preexisting knowledges of complex systems, in addition to the commitment of dozens of hours simply to move through a game experience. The videogame industry cultivated the player-consumer identity of the “gamer” as someone who did not just play videogames but lived them, dedicating vast amounts of time to particular games and vast amounts of money to particular hardware.

The Pokémon games were made for gamers: designed primarily for a young player hunched over a small screen for uninterrupted hours. As such, over the decades, Tajiri’s nostalgic experience has become itself a nostalgia for those who grew up playing the Pokémon games, even as the brand remains a contemporary franchise for new generations of gamers, with regular releases of new games with new creatures to collect and new systems to master. Players continue to play videogames for most of their life, but the kinds of videogames they engage with shifts dramatically. As they grow older, players don’t have time to be gamers.

Flexible, mobile play

Juul’s (2010) extensive survey of casual videogame players demonstrates how most “core” videogames are simply too inflexible for the play behaviours of most people. Players of casual videogames are not necessarily looking for more superficial or “easy” engagements, but engagements that most flexibly integrate with their everyday lives rather than interrupt them. Here, the rise of the smartphone as a videogame platform has played a radical intervention. Whereas casual videogames historically lived in Internet browsers or, for a few years, on Nintendo’s Wii console, now that many adults have a powerful and Internet-connected device always within reach in their pocket or handbag, the smartphone has become the ideal platform for short, sporadic, and flexible moments of video play.

Beyond games, mobile communication researchers such as Cui and Roto (2008, p. 913) have long shown how users engage with mobile media in short, interruptible sessions throughout their everyday life. The fact that the mobile phone is a piece of hardware that is always already on the body as a “wearable screen” (Richardson, 2012) makes it an ideal platform for certain modes of flexible, glanced-at videogame play; games that could be played by a “body in waiting” (Hjorth & Richardson, 2009): a round of Angry Birds while waiting for the bus, a session of Candy Crush during the commercial break, a turn of Words With Friends on the toilet. As a private and wearable haptic screen that becomes part of our embodied and everyday lived experience of being-in-the-world publicly, the smartphone has radically shifted the context of videogames in society: where they are played, who is seen to play them, how they are designed, how they are commercially viable.

A convergence of brand and technology

This is apparent nowhere as vividly as in the changing attitudes of the traditional companies that made their riches on the cultivated gamer audience, such as Nintendo. In 2011, speaking at the Game Developers Conference, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fil-Aime called the iPhone’s large library of short, cheap games “one of the biggest risks today in our gaming industry” (in Kshosfy, 2011). Today, however, Nintendo has conceded that the casual demographics its Wii console haemorrhaged to Apple’s and Google’s powerful, on-the-body devices are never returning, and has decided to play ball in this new reality the smartphone has created.

The phenomenon of Pokémon Go marks a moment of increased tension between traditional videogame design and marketing ideologies that cultivated a very narrow “gamer” demographic, and the broader casual demographics of the smartphone, as they converge through the novelties of augmented-reality and location-based play. A trip to your local Pokéstop quickly shows two major audiences: the 20- or 30-something reliving their childhood experience of catching Pokémon, surprised or boastful about the number of names they still remember; and the young child walking around with the parent’s phone or the family’s tablet, catching these creatures that persist as contemporary and popular. For each, Pokémon Go offers a free, simply, social, and flexible play experience that nonetheless captures the serial and kawaii aesthetics of the original game and related media.

The smartphone, as a wearable and haptic screen that we incorporate into our lived experience of being-in-the-world, has radically converged and recontextualised how we engage with different forms of media, not least of all the videogame. In Pokémon Go we see this recontextualisation transform a core videogame franchise into a ubiquitous pop cultural icon, a niche videogame experience into an accessible casual experience attractive to a broader player base. To read the success of Pokémon Go as a success of augmented reality is to miss that the augmented-reality and locative aspects of Pokémon Go are merely the intermediary hinge between the Pokémon franchise’s sheer brand power and the ubiquity of the smartphone as an intimate and incorporated technology that we take out into the world as part of our self.