(Networked) Herds of Monster-Chasing Zombies: Pokemon Go, Regional Gaming Networks & the Playful Surveillance of the City
Introduction
In July of 2016, the mobile game Pokemon Go (PG) was released in most countries around the world. The game proceeded to take over city streets, social media feeds, and our collective imaginations. It quickly became a global phenomena and was one of the most downloaded and profitable mobile games in 2016. While PG is certainly not the first location-based, augmented reality application to gamify public space, at the time, it was the most widely adopted, and in effect, was credited for popularising this genre of game.
The rapid adoption of PG and its traction on social media created a global, cultural moment that was referred to as ‘Pokemania’. Unsurprisingly, the media coverage surrounding this moment tended to be melodramatic and ripe with technological determinist sentiment. As Nathan Jurgenson (2016) of Real Life Magazine wrote, “Much of the coverage described the game as watershed moment, where a science fiction premise burst into everyday life […] an app was stealing people from reality and the purity of nature was being debased by herds of monster-chasing zombies”.
This rhetoric of ‘debasing’ — not only of nature, but personally and culturally signifigant spaces — was especially present in the media coverage surrounding Niantic’s in-game location assignments. Niantic, borrowing from a mix of public information sources and user-selected locations from their previous gaming venture Ingress, transformed small businesses, landmarks, public art, parks, and other places of local signfigance into ‘Pokestops’ (venues to replenish in-game resources) and ‘Pokemon Gyms’ (venues to battle and train Pokemon). While many local buisnesses embraced and even leveraged their inclusion in the augmented game layer, other locations were contested and became the topic of public discussion and debate.
In what follows, I discuss and engage with one event in particular which recieved a lot of media attention and was often used as an exemplar of the dangers of augmenting reality in such a way. By employing T.L. Taylor’s (2009) notion of ‘assemblage of play’ and Michael Hardey’s (2007) theorisation of the city in the age of the internet, I will highlight the range of actors (humans and non-humans), concepts, practices, and relations that made up this event (‘play moment’), all of which demonstrate a ‘synergistic relationship’ between people, data, and localities. Before I begin though, I will breifly review some of the scholastic commentary and research which was produced about this cultural moment in order to tease out my own analysis.
Scholastic Pokemania
Scholarly engagements with the PG phenomena have made invaluable contributions to our understandings of several elements of this ‘assemblage of play’. In a special issue of Mobile Media & Communication (2017), eleven scholars highlighed how the game sits at the nexus of multiple technological, cultural, and economic trajectories. While some focused on the politics of the game, others focused on the practices which characterised the release of this instalment of the franchise.
In regards to the latter approach and focus on practices, I was surprised by the absense of a more thorough consideration of the social and networked practices which developed around the game. Many contributors to this special issue certainlly mentioned the social dimensions of the game, however they limited their analyses to (the potential for) face-to-face encounters. For example, Lee Humphreys (2017) highlighted how these encounters are made possible because of the way that the game brings players into public space. Whereas Christian Licoppe (2017) suggested that because PG didn’t initally adopt social networking features, that there was little possibility of the development of robust gaming communities. Closely related to this idea, Adriana de Souza e Silva (2017) noted how this also means that players are unable to engage in ‘collateral surveillance’ seeing as they don’t encounter one another on the game’s interface. In two cases, gaming community (singular) was discussed in regards to generating and sharing game knowledge (McCrea, 2017), and in terms of constructing and maintaining the ‘distributed imagination’ associated with the franchise (Giddings, 2017).
There was, however, no acknowledgement of the myriad of communities — or what I think is more appropriatly refered to as ‘gaming networks’ — which developed around the localities of play via social media platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord. These types of networks were, in fact, unique to this instalment of the franchise, and provide more than just knowledge and expertise about gameplay, but also the regionally unique game space.
Based on the coming analysis of an event known as the ‘Safari Zone’ , and my own experiences playing the game and participanting in these gaming networks, I suggest that ignoring their emergence — despite the fact that their associated interactions and communications don’t occur on the PG platform itself — is to ignore an important facet of the PG phenomena. As I will demonstrate next, these regional gaming networks are signifigant because they infrom it’s members’ understandings and experiences of both the game and their localities, and in doing so have implications for how bodies, devices, and in-game events play out and become dispersed across territorial space.
The ‘Safari Zone’
Shortly after PG’s release, a neighborhood outside of Sydney Australia experienced a large influx of PG players who were hoping to catch rare ‘Pokemon’ (in-game creatures that players collect, train, evolve, and battle) in the ‘Safari Zone’, or what is better known by residents of this suburb as Peg Paterson Park. This park, or rather a small geographical portion of this park, gained this nickname due to it having three landmarks in close proximity to one another that were transformed into overlapping ‘Pokestops’ on Niantic’s servers.
Due to in-game mechanics, overlapping venues are ideal places for players to assign ‘Lures’ (in-game resources which attract more, and often rare Pokemon to a single ‘Pokestop’), creating a situation where players can stay in one place for 30 minutes and catch Pokemon, as opposed to having to walk around to do so. Unlike ‘Incense’ (in-game resources which attract Pokemon to an individual player), ‘Lures’ can be seen and utilised by both the player who activates the resource and other players who are in close proximity to that ‘Pokestop’. In this way, ‘Lures’ are a sort of in-game ‘public good’, whereas ‘Incense’ are more of a ‘private good’. Both of these resources can be utilised seperatly or in tandem to increase the chances of individual players encountering and catching augmented monsters to add to their collections. And this is exactly what happened following the launch of the game, these three overlapping ‘Pokestops’ in Peg Paterson Park quickly became a hotspot for ‘Lures’, ‘Incense’, ‘Pokemon”, and players alike — in the process furthur appropriating this nickname.
Word of the ‘Safari Zone’ quickly spread across social media and mainstream news channels, prompting hundreds of players to regularly turn up in the park despite record cold winter temperatures. According to local news channels, during peak times there were so many people in the park that they were spilling out onto the roads, impacting the flow of traffic. In one case, the crowds of people even infringed on the ability of a fire truck to respond to an emergency. Additionally, the influx of visitors put a strain on the physical conditions of the park, where the grass was trampled to mud, a large recreational chess set was broken and later removed, and an increased amount of litter appeared. Residents of the neighborhood reported that noise from the crowds persisted until the early hours of the morning. At one point, the police were even brought in to keep an eye on the pedestrain and vehicle traffic. Together, these incidences and complaints prompted the Sydney Council to petition Niantic to remove at least two of the three ‘Pokestops’ from the park.
PG Hotspots & Regional Gaming Networks
There are of course several noteworthy facets of this disruptive ‘play moment’, however what I want to focus our attention on is how exactly this suburban park gained an in-game reputation, and how quickly this information about the park (in relation to gameplay) was disseminated across various digital channels. Importantly, this information about the ‘Safari Zone’ was not offered up to all players by Niantic’s publicity team, nor was it even available to all players based in Sydney through the game’s interface (players can only see what is directly around them). In this context then, it was only when social media channels were created and opened up, that in-game strategies as well as the best places for gameplay could be shared, disseminated, and utilised.
The advertising and PR efforts of Niantic encourage players to get out and explore their localities, however regional social media networks allow players to do so in ways which potentially maximise their returns. These social media channels necessitate that players explore their localities and report back to the larger network both textually (by creating detailed posts) and visually (by posting screenshots). In this context, a kind of ‘participatory veillance’ (Lupton, 2015) or ‘collective surevillance’ (Hardey, 2007) is enabled and promoted which centres on the geo-social terrain of a city in relation to gameplay. When many players explore their surroundings and broadcast their findings, the members of these channels are provided with information that may very likely inform their future forays into public space as they pursue in-game rewards.
These locally-distributed social and surveillant practices are only useful given the regional status of these groups — something I learned the hard way. For example, when I first joined the Edinburgh PG Facebook group, I was still living in Portland and joined because I wanted to see what was going on, and as a way to write up my PhD research proposal which centred on gameplay in the Scottish capital. As a budding ethnographer, I decided that it was important that I not just lurk, but participate, so I decided to post a screenshot which I thought would garner some laughs. However I quickly learned that my humour was misplaced due to it depicting a play experience which wasn’t grounded in Edinburgh — something which became blatantly clear to the other members of this network due to my screenshot depicting a ‘Pokemon’ that is regionally unique to the US (* facepalm *). On top of this, my attempt at humour failed because it didn’t also assist members of this network in their tracking and collecting of ‘Pokemon’ in their immediate surroundings. Within seconds, I was found out and categorised as an outsider (‘yank[ee]’). I was absolutly mortified and decided that lurking would be my go-to mode of engagement until I officially moved to Edinburgh and began playing and researching PG there.
This experience made it apparent to me that each city, while being apart of the same global game space, has different qualities and thus requires slightly different kinds of knowledge to get the most out of the game. In this way, it appears that the emergece of regional PG gaming networks — NOT JUST the game itself — are central to understanding how certain locations, like Peg Paterson Park, became so popular and inudated with people.
Concluding Thoughts
The various elements of this ‘assemblage of play’ which came together and co-constructed this event demonstrate the importance of not only understanding the more-than-digital practices of regional gaming networks, but also how the game is apart of a much broader trend towards the digital ‘informationalization of place’ (Burrows and Ellison, 2004; Burrows and Gane, 2006; Parker et al., 2007). By this I mean that the game, and this event in particular, embodies what Michael Hardey (2007) refers to as a ‘synergistic relationship’ linking individuals to data and locality.
In this relationship, Hardey (2007) argues that localities become reformed through the interweaving of geolocational data, whereby physical settings and virtual venues will function interdependently,and will mostly complement one another within transformed patterns of urban life. Here, places become embedded in social networks and contextualised by information, creating a context where place becomes malleable, taking on different meanings for different people at different times. This relationship also marks changes in how we experience and live in cities, where individuals can be more readily mobile, leaving traces of themselves (both knowingly and unknowingly) in informational space, marking a context in which individuals live increasingly beyond their private bodies (Sheller and Urry, 2003).
What is supposed by Hardey (2007) in regards to the interactions between these digitally-transformed entities is that they are both shaped by a “mesh of user-generated data” (p. 879). Where individuals may use this information to “make nuanced choices” about places to occupy and inhabit, and that these choices may be “increasingly fleeting, planned and dynamic” (p. 880). He goes on to write: “[t]here is a potential rapid feedback loop here as locations in the city may experience sudden flows of visitors or customers as people follow lines of information or seek out the presence of those from their social network” (p. 880). The implications of this digital interweaving then is that these resources may encourage a ‘social sorting of the city’ (Burrows and Gane, 2006) as people contribute data and utilise the information from these resources to inform their movements through space. Taken together, the city may begin to follow patterns of habitation and sociability initally sketched out online — suggesting that these resources are not isolated in “cyberspace”, but are now part and parcel of everyday urban life.
PG — and social-locative media platforms more broadly — thus upset the ‘real/virtual’ dichotomy that is so engrained in our spatial imaginings of the internet and embodied in the aforementioned concept of ‘cyberspace’. Related to this upset, it is important to highlight how technically speaking, a ‘Pokestop’ or ‘Gym’ cannot be on public or private property, because they do not exist in the physical world. They are merely geolocational data points on Niantic’s servers represented by circles hovering over a stylised Google Map of the area surrounding the player. This visual representation of a data point is in turn interpreted by the player with the help of their mobile, smart device. In other words, the three overlapping geolocated points in Peg Paterson Park did not have any material ramifications in and of themselves. It was only when these augmentations became signifigant in the PG game space and gained value within the Sydney PG social media channels, that these augmented points could have any physical ramifications. But importantly, it is only via human-technology interaction, and often times the aggregated interactions of many players over time, that bring these augmentations into the realm of physical, material experience. In this way, this PG-related ‘assemblage of play’ suggests that we need new spatial metaphors for thinking about the internet and its relationship to lived experience.
The metaphor of ‘cyberspace’ thus constrains, enables, and orders distinct ways of imagining the interactions between people, information, code, and devices through digital networks, and these imaginings in turn have signfigant effects for how politics are enacted and places brought into being (Graham, 2013). In the case of PG, and especially the media attention surrounding the ‘Safari Zone’, I would qualify this insight by adding that this inaccurate spatial imagining additionally affects how we understand and discuss ‘subjectivity’ and ‘agency’ in relation to digital technologies. In this way, I argue that players of PG are not ‘zombies’ with a mob mentality, so immersed in the reality on their screens that they have little to no regard for public space — but instead, are ‘networked individuals’ (Rainie and Wellman, 2012) who reguarly navigate ‘grounded augmented realities’ (Graham, 2013) and make conscious decisions to “follow lines of information” (Hardey, 2007, p. 880) in order to accomplish their in-game goals, and be apart of novel phenomena which re-enchants their localities and interfaces them with other peoples who share their interests.
