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A woman points her smartphone at the Brandenburg Gate as she plays the Pokémon Go game in Berlin
A woman points her smartphone at the Brandenburg Gate as she plays the Pokémon Go game in Berlin. Photograph: Sophia Kembowski/AFP/Getty Images
A woman points her smartphone at the Brandenburg Gate as she plays the Pokémon Go game in Berlin. Photograph: Sophia Kembowski/AFP/Getty Images

The Guardian view on Pokémon Go: augmented merchandising

This article is more than 7 years old

Engrossing and high-grossing, this game is a further sign of the commercialisation of our imaginations

The streets are suddenly full of people ignoring obvious obstacles and dangers because they are playing a collective game on their smartphones. Pokémon Go requires players to walk around looking through their smartphone cameras, waiting for them to show an image of a Pokémon superimposed onto the real-world scene. The aim is to capture them with a phone gesture: there are 150 different varieties, some more common than others. The game has been a sensation in a sensational world (the games market worldwide grossed $6bn in May), putting 25% on the value of Nintendo, the company that owns Pokémon, and downloaded so often in its first week that it is now on more smartphones than the dating app Tinder and has as many active users as Twitter. Yet, technically, it is unremarkable: what’s interesting is what it tells us about ourselves, and about the economy that we work and play within.

To overlay reality with an imagined meaning, to blur the boundary between real and virtual worlds, is something we have always done. The technology has changed, but in London, for example, there is usually a queue at King’s Cross station for the sign marking “Platform 9¾”, from where the Hogwarts Express is supposed to leave – a collective fantasy almost entirely driven by print. Augmented reality has long been imagined in science fiction, written about and filmed. The smartphone gives it another technological expression but it can hardly be said to give it a new reality. What is novel about Pokémon Go is that it has taken an existing game framework and plugged into a story, or a game, that many of the players have been familiar with since their childhood: the young adults playing on their smartphones now are those who played Pokémon with cards and game consoles in their schooldays.

Play is by definition an activity undertaken for its own sake, with no other reward. Marketing childhood games changed something fundamental. The game was no longer the property of the players. The rules could no longer be altered to suit them. In some ways this led to better and more interesting games. But it also means that the players’ joys were increasingly some companies’ profits. With the emergence of computer games, the distinction between play and commerce vanished almost entirely and with the present dominance of massive multiplayer games, in which people play with each other spontaneously inside an imaginary world which can have considerable cash value, the old rules of childhood have almost disappeared.

Pokémon Go offers the players a chance to revert to the pursuits of their childhood. It seems to have little appeal to people who never played the original game. But it offers the owners much more. Google has recruited an army of pedestrians who will map the urban world for it. By designating some places as important to the game it can draw players there, and it is only a matter of time before it starts selling to businesses the ability to draw in potential customers like that. After that will come location-based advertising, where the phone in your hand will try to sell you things depending on your physical location, just as it presently does depending on your travels across the web. The ultimate goal of Pokémon Go is to make shopping the only game in town. If that happens, we will all be the poorer.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Pokémon still going: Taiwan’s love affair with the game the world forgot

  • Pokémon Go players outraged after maps shut down by game update

  • Pokémon Go can boost health by making gamers exercise, says GP

  • Pokémon Go: London players robbed of phones at gunpoint

  • Apple CEO Tim Cook outs himself as a huge 'Pokeymans' fan

  • Pokémon Go: five tricks for pro players that are almost as good as cheats

  • Could Pokémon Go improve people's health?

  • Apple plans to invest in augmented reality following success of Pokémon Go

  • Pokémon Go players urged not to venture into Fukushima disaster zone

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