Pokémon Go has been around since
July 2016, yet it remains the most popular and prevalent augmented reality smartphone
game around. In that time, its continued popularity owes much to a steady
stream of updates and events that have retained the interests of a large group
of players. Notably, the second generation of Pokémon from the original
Gold/Silver/Crystal games were introduced back in February, adding another 80
species for players to find and catch. Additionally, there has been a series of
themed events, including Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Solstice, Equinox, and
more, which have enabled players to more readily catch specific types of Pokémon,
hatch eggs quicker, and earn more candy and/or stardust to evolve and power up their
Pokémon.
Having continued to play the game
on a daily basis since its release, I’ve had ample opportunity to gauge the changes
the game has witnessed. While my previous blog post on Pokémon Go discussed it
broadly in relation to other, already-existing examples of pervasive games, here I’m going to focus on a major, lasting change
that has re-defined the gameplay of Pokémon Go itself: raid battles in gyms.
For those who are unaware, raid
battles are opportunities for Pokémon Go players to co-operate with each other to
defeat, and ultimately capture, rare Pokémon that usually aren’t found in the
wild. Indeed, it was through this element of the gameplay that legendary Pokémon
(extremely rare and powerful species) were first introduced for players to
catch.
Raid battles have brought about
probably the most significant change in the way the game is played since its
release. These events have actively brought players together at specific
locations and times with the aim of achieving a common goal within the game,
creating new realms of interaction with other players and with the environments
in which they play. In this post, I’m going to discuss how these changes affect
experiences of social life and public space within cities.
Timelines
When a raid battle is going to
take place, a large egg appears above the gym where the event will be happening,
with an hour-long timer counting down to the start of the event. Once the
countdown ends, players have an hour to attempt the raid before the event
finishes. The timing of raids during the day, though confined roughly to the
daylight hours, is otherwise unpredictable. You never know exactly where or
when a raid is going to occur, and which Pokémon will appear when the event
begins.
This two-hour window of time from
when a raid is announced to when it finishes is fairly short, requiring a
certain level of organisation and co-operation between players if they are to
successfully complete the raid. Participants need to know exactly where a raid
is occurring/will occur, when they need to be there, and which Pokémon is up
for grabs. When the raid boss is a weaker Pokémon, it can typically be defeated
by one or two players, but 4-star or 5-star legendary raids often require at
least 4 or 5 players to complete successfully. So the ability to share
information quickly among fellow players is crucial.
As a result, many players have
set up groups for raids in their local areas on instant messaging services such
as Facebook’s Messenger and Discord. Usually, a player will inform the group of
a raid that’s happening in the area, people will show their interest (or not), and
will then agree on a time to meet and take down the raid boss.
Of course, most people don’t have
the luxury of being available any time (or location) to join in a raid. One of
the most interesting observations I’ve made of player behaviour during this
mode of gameplay is the interaction between raid events and the everyday
rhythms of urban life.
Work and school/university
commitments are the most common obstacles to participation, often confining
players to raiding beforehand or afterwards, or during breaks. It’s this organisation
of the working day that has led some players to complain about the fact that raids only occur during the daytime. But even
for those who are out and about during the day, hindrances can be caused by
anything that makes a demand on a person’s time, such as meeting friends and
family; using public transport; the time on a car parking ticket.
The often contradictory
relationships between the times and places of a person’s typical day in the
city and those of raid events made me think about Pokémon Go in relation to Henri
Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis.
Lefebvre describes everyday urban life as ‘polyrhythmic’, consisting of a
multiplicity of individual natural and artificial routines and events that come
together and interact in the city. When these rhythms unite with one another in
a positive, healthy manner, this is known as ‘eurhythmia’. Other times, there
is a discordance of the rhythms that leads to suffering, which Lefebvre calls ‘arrhythmia’.
This could include, for example, traffic jams, missed connections on public
transport, and their associated impacts such as lateness for work.
It’s fascinating to see these
different rhythms colliding around raid events, as moments that are haphazardly
imposed on the urban ‘schedule’ when announced. As players make plans to
attend, whether coming from work, home, school, or another situation, raids interrupt
and reshape the patterns of activity taking place in cities. On many occasions,
I’ve witnessed the conflict players are faced with when they are late returning
to work from their lunch break, but are desperate to catch the Pokémon on offer.
Meanwhile, the delay has been caused by another player arriving late due to a
bus not turning up, or because they were waiting for their lecture to finish. Individual
timelines disconnect from other places and times, converging around the time
and location of the raid event, and dispersing again when it is finished.
Ultimately, the variation the
timing and location of raid events, and the situations in which players find
themselves on any given day, mean that each raid can have completely different
mixes and quantities of people attending. Sometimes not enough people take part
to beat the raid boss, or the meet-up has to be abandoned altogether. It is part
of the unpredictability of raid events that makes them interesting to take part
in, and individually unique.
Relationships
In this way, raids bring you into
contact with a wide group of people and – most significantly – segments of the
local community with which you may not normally interact. I’ve taken part in
raids with children as a young as 4 or 5 and adults in their 60s, at the same
time. I’ve met players with serious speech impediments, mental problems, and
other disabilities unrelated to mobility, simply due to a shared interest in
the game. There aren’t many other situations where you could realistically find
a lecturer, a toddler, a grandmother, a shop assistant, and a student, all
communicating and working together to achieve a common goal. Everyone wants the
same thing, which, to some degree, helps smooth over social differences by
creating a framework of interaction that is equal, at least during the events.
Of course, this isn’t to say that
raids are a utopian paradise of equal participation. Aside from the pre-given necessity
to own a smartphone to play the game, Pokémon Go – and particularly the
movement and accessibility needed to reach different raid locations – remains
difficult for those with physical disabilities. There are also financial
barriers to participation in raids. Some players can afford to regularly buy premium
raid passes (79p of in-game coins), which allow them to participate in more
raids per day than the standard one available through the daily free raid pass
given to players. It can be disheartening when a raid group agrees to move
together to another nearby raid event, yet you feel unable to participate
because of money limitations.
Nonetheless, you don’t have to
attend every local raid to feel part of a distinct Pokémon Go community. After
only a short time raiding, I began noticing the same faces at raid events, and got
to know people I would happily talk to outside of a raid scenario. Each raid
event leaves a distinct trace in your mind – a specific time, place, group of
people, and series of occurrences. This shared memory forged by raiding can
then provide a focal point for lasting relationships, or at least talking
points that allow you to continue conversations into the future. Furthermore,
the shared premise of convening to play Pokémon Go means that there are always easy
topics of conversation: the game itself and news about the game, as well as
technology, video games, and urban life more generally.
While we’re talking about
relationships, though, it is important to remember that not everyone you
interact with during raids is necessarily a fellow player. This has always already
been the case when playing the game by yourself, but during raids the effect of
this interaction is usually more pronounced, as you establish more of a
presence within the public space you are occupying by standing in a group.
At one gym in Canterbury, the
Three Tuns Pub, the pavements are very narrow, meaning that the raid group
often takes up the whole pavement and sometimes spills out into the road. On
one occasion, this led to an angry altercation with a passing motorist. In the
same location on a different day, one older gentleman – who seemed a little
inebriated at the time – was so startled by a group of people all looking at
their smartphones that he felt the need to moan about what digital technology
is doing to the world, and to keep telling us that we should be communicating face-to-face.
This man missed the key point about
the relationships cultivated by Pokémon Go - that, if it weren’t for the game,
none of us would have had any reason to meet in person. In fact, raids are a
prime example of how digital technology and games can bring people together in
the corporeal world, whether they are players or passersby, acquaintances or
strangers.
Tensions
In any interaction between strangers
in public, there is the potential for negative outcomes as well as positive
ones. While such problems are mitigated by shared interest in the game and Pokémon
franchise, the potential for tension is heightened by the necessity for some
level of organisation between players attending raids. These group decisions typically
include when to begin a raid, how long to wait for other possible attendees,
and whether to move onto another raid once the current one finishes. Though
these choices may seem uncontroversial, raid groups are organic, makeshift
communities, meaning that clear rules and boundaries of social etiquette often
haven’t been established. This can create friction when one person’s idea of
acceptable behaviour fails to match another participant’s.
Indeed, in my local raid group, I
recently witnessed a very heated argument on the Messenger chat over a decision
to begin a raid before one player had arrived. It may seem courteous to always
wait until every person who agrees to participate has arrived, and generally this
is what happens. Yet it is also a valid argument that if you have set a
designated time in advance to meet, and the other participants are ready and
have other commitments they need to fulfil afterwards, then it’s justifiable to
begin a raid without the one person who fails to turn up on time.
Negotiating these decisions is ultimately
circumstantial, depending upon the players there, their time limitations and other
restricting factors, alongside elements of urban life that are harder for
individuals to control, such as untimely public transport, traffic (pedestrian
or vehicular), emergencies, and weather conditions. The process of taking these
varying factors into account serves to illustrate the messy relationships
between different human and non-human agents that influence the rhythms of our
everyday lives.
The significance of infrastructure is especially acute in Pokémon
Go, as a game that is strongly dependent on its constituent technologies being
fully-functioning (as opposed to Geocaching,
for example, where the imprecision of GPS technology actively encourages
players to hunt for treasure in the physical environment). When just one of the
requisite systems fails in Pokémon Go - such as mobile internet, GPS, the app,
or the phone’s system itself – the game experience deteriorates significantly.
As an example of this, at one
location in Canterbury, where I have regularly raided without too many issues,
my raid group and I once experienced exceptionally slow mobile internet. It was
the University of Kent’s graduation day, and the bus station was crammed with
students and their families arriving at midday for their ceremonies at the
cathedral. Clearly, many of this crowd were connected to the various mobile networks,
which reduced the network capacity available and made everyone’s connections
extremely slow. In the end, it took us about 25 minutes – when the human
traffic started to dwindle – to complete the raid without connection issues.
Niantic are no strangers to the
crippling impact of network problems, which manifested most famously with the
spectacular failure of Pokémon Go’s first official real-world event in July, Pokémon
Go Fest in Chicago’s Grant Park, when the network capacity was unable to cope
with the volume of players (roughly 20,000) who turned up. It demonstrates the
importance of these very material factors that enable our electronic devices to
function properly, which we often take for granted in day-to-day life.
As the overlapping socio-material
rhythms of urban life intersect around raid events, it is evident that they can
interact in ways that can tend towards dissonance as well as resonance.
_____
At a time when digital technology
is becoming an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life, signalled by
growing use of terms such as ‘smart city’ and ‘media city’, we can more readily
detect the importance of both human and non-human actors to how we experience
cities. Augmented reality games such as Pokémon Go actively rely on these
diverse human and material agents to operate, which makes us more aware of and
reliant on them throughout our everyday lives. The downside of this heightened
interaction between urban stakeholders is the potential for antagonistic
relationships to develop, as well as amiable ones. Cities by definition are
sites of difference, where one user’s uses and expectations of public space do not necessarily
align with another user’s, or with the material attributes of the spaces
themselves. Events are particularly problematic because they create concentrated
nodes of both human activity and emotional expectation that infringe upon people’s
everyday routines and behaviours, voluntarily if you’re a player, or
involuntarily if you’re an unwitting passerby.
Ultimately, these observations
demonstrate what is distinctive about pervasive gaming, as opposed to other
game genres and even other types of urban activity. That is, that these media
implicate people and systems that are not necessarily stakeholders in the game.
This has its rewards. It can bring those who play the game closer to the
environments and communities in which they live, fostering knowledge of,
attachment to, and participation in social relationships that would not have
developed otherwise. At the same time, it presents complications for urban
social life, for which there are often no clear guidelines on how to proceed. This
explains the brief moral panic that dominated the media when the game first
released, when it was assumed that everyone would be mindlessly walking off
cliffs and trespassing en masse onto private property, smartphone in hand.
With regard to the aim of fostering
positive, engaging relationships with people and places, raids are by far the
most innovative feature of Pokémon Go so far. It has taken to a whole new level
the game’s remarkable capacity to bring people together by forging lasting
relationships based on shared, memorable experiences in a place. Given their
success, it is unsurprising that we are already seeing experimentation with the
format of raids. Niantic have begun trialling ‘EX Raids’ in the UK and
elsewhere for the powerful legendary Pokémon from Generation I, Mewtwo. Unlike
the unpredictability of regular raids, EX-raids are invite-only, distributed
days in advance, where the event is set for a designated time, date, and
location. So far there have been relatively few EX Raids – I’ve only heard of
one happening in Canterbury. But as these events become more widespread, it
will be revealing to gauge how the experience compares to regular raids.
In December players can also look
forward to the release of Pokémon from Generation III, though this is not going
to have lasting consequences for how the game is played. What I’m particularly
excited about is the next substantial change in the mechanics of how the game
operates, where a whole new style of gameplay is introduced, because this is
where innovation is more likely to happen. In the wider context of pervasive
games, Pokémon Go’s popularity makes it a valuable case study for investigating
the functioning and impact of different forms of play and creativity in cities,
especially that which uses digital technology. And it is important to note that,
if the game is to retain its popularity, it will have to continue to break new
ground in the experiences it offers players. Simply adding new Pokémon and
repeating the same events won’t suffice for keeping players engaged, amidst the
array of other commitments that everyday urban life presents to them.
