{"id":21481,"date":"2016-08-05T08:03:31","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T12:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21481"},"modified":"2016-08-05T08:03:31","modified_gmt":"2016-08-05T12:03:31","slug":"people-play-pokemon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/08\/05\/people-play-pokemon\/","title":{"rendered":"People Play Pok\u00e9mon"},"content":{"rendered":"

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My mom and I spent some part of the 1995 summer with my aunt and her house, complete with backyard. I was three, and having lived most of my life in a small New York studio apartment, my mom must\u2019ve thought I would enjoy the few elements of nature often found in quiet Californian suburbs. She was wrong: each time they tried setting me in the grass, I would crawl desperately back to the beautiful, safe, concrete patio. <\/span><\/p>\n

This is a childhood story that still speaks to my identity: camping is not my first choice of activities, and the narratives of people who lose themselves in the wilderness are \u00a0tedious to me. So it was quite a surprise when I willing accepted the hiking trail <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> had set for me with the promise of Clefairies: <\/span><\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> managed this feat is a miracle, and betrays my investment in the game. <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon<\/span><\/i> celebrates its 20th birthday this year; in those twenty years, a generation of young adults grew up building the Pok\u00e9mon World over kitchen tables and in parks. <\/span>Anthropologist Anne Allison described<\/span><\/a> Pok\u00e9mon<\/span><\/i>\u2019s designers as part of a trend in game design through the 90s that used cheaper digital technology to resolve the increasing isolation of children. If children couldn\u2019t fit friends into the regimented schedule of school, extracurriculars, and sleep, then companies could sell games that made friends portable and accessible on each child\u2019s schedule. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Although <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon<\/span><\/i> started as corporate code, demand soon outstripped Nintendo\u2019s capacity to produce <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon<\/span><\/i>. Unlicensed merchandise and cards spawned anywhere demand existed. These days, Pok\u00e9mon has its own search tag on most porn sites, and is comfortably in <\/span>the top 10<\/span><\/a> of FanFiction fandoms. In 2014, a cult quickly developed around <\/span>Twitch Plays Pok\u00e9mon<\/span><\/i><\/a>: an event in which some hundred thousand players worked together to complete <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon: Red Version<\/span><\/i>, through Twitch.TV\u2019s chat screen. Playing Pok\u00e9mon\u2013\u2013whether at the kitchen table, at recess, or after school\u2013\u2013has become a collective act of participation. The French sociologist \u00c8mile Durkheim would have called it the collective effervescence of the 1990s: an activity as much about the affect and socialization produced as it was about the game. Nintendo may have designed it, but people made it real. <\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no accident that most people who register critiques of the game are left with bemusement at why the game captivates: the game\u2019s immersion has incorporated the previous efforts of players in the Pok\u00e9mon world. <\/span>Sam Kriss at Jacobin<\/span><\/a> takes the game to task for another reason: it crashes through our reality, displacing it with an \u201cobjective fantasy\u201d where all possible routes are already mapped. In other words, the game pretends to provide you with a fantastical world, but actually is strictly regimented access to everyday, physical space.<\/span><\/p>\n

In some ways, Kriss is correct in his assessment. While the game offers the potential to live a child\u2019s dream as an adult, it does so with specific paths laid out, and thus sharply limits the imaginative prowess. This is especially true with the placement of Pok\u00e9Stops. Pok\u00e9Stops serve two important functions in the game: They allow players to obtain items without paying for the in-game currency (this is, after all, a Freemium game), and they allow for the use of Pok\u00e9Lures, an item that draws wild Pok\u00e9mon to the location of the Pok\u00e9Stop for thirty minutes. The promise of easily attainable Pok\u00e9mon, made visible by petals falling from the stop\u2019s icon, inevitably lures players as consistently as they do Pok\u00e9mon. And when multiple Pok\u00e9Lures are used in close proximity, groups of strangers suddenly talk to each other with a common vocabulary; between bouts of excited shouting about the rare Pok\u00e9mon that just flashed on everyone\u2019s screens.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pok\u00e9Lures are the heart that drives socializing in the game. They\u2019re a new coffeehouse or bar: one shows up on my screen, followed quickly by another right across the street, and I know that I\u2019ll run into the set of players I\u2019ve met at similar setups of Pok\u00e9Lures. Conversations often run between local events in New Haven, and rumors of Pok\u00e9mon spot in specific regions: \u201cYeah, West Haven is full of Jynx at night,\u201d someone tells me. <\/span>Dammit<\/span><\/i>, I think to myself. <\/span>I\u2019d need a car to get there<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m fortunate that playing is an option at all: Pok\u00e9Stops and their Lures are usually associated with spaces that have \u201ccultural significance.\u201d Art installations, interesting historical landmarks, or monuments, criterion that often end up placing them in a critical mass within cities. Some players have said they have to drive ten minutes before finding a single Pok\u00e9Stop. Meanwhile, on a recent trip to New York, a friend told me the 13-15 Pok\u00e9Lures set up within a five minute radius was a \u201cslow\u201d night for Pok\u00e9mon in Central Park. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"13652639_10153658543821776_2016300774_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"13823377_10153658543941776_1871262452_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And yet, even critiques like Kriss\u2019 rely on a simplified relationship between players and rules. We are describing vast swathes of the population, many of whom play the game for their own purposes. Attempting to categorize all experiences as a single perspective of purpose risks reframing <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> as another product of an ill-defined mass culture. In the mid-twentieth century, cultural studies studies\u2013\u2013studying the heterogeneity of culture and cultural reception\u2013\u2013was born to push against the anxiety of the atomized individual, found in many critiques of mass culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

But <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> neither suspends nor homogenizes the problems of identity in twenty-first century America. <\/span>Maddy Myers<\/span><\/a> anticipates that \u201cAre you playing <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i>?\u201d will become one of the hottest pick-up lines of 2016; <\/span>Pok\u00e9Match <\/span><\/a>appears to validate her concerns. The timing of <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i>\u2019s release\u2013\u2013in the aftermath of America reeling after the footage of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, dying, as a result of municipal police\u2013\u2013has made the game a debate between escapism from brutal atrocities and the fact that such escapism is limited by <\/span>realistic expectations of safety<\/span><\/a> for Black folks while playing the game. Just as some people \u201cescape\u201d by the spectacle on their screens, so do others negotiate these issues as part of the experience of play. <\/span><\/p>\n

Critiques of mass culture also found trouble in their excessive reliance on the structure set by rules: it denied the possibility of resistance. If the rules of Pok\u00e9mon Go are so objectively fixed, there is little hope of using the game for anything more than the game\u2019s designated purpose. This interpretation of cultural limitations is what the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre resists in his text <\/span>The Production of Space<\/span><\/i>. Lefebvre viewed the triumph of \u201cmental space\u201d (that of theorizing, of reading, of rulemaking) over \u201cphysical space\u201d (where we eat, sleep, and play) as nonsensical and unsubstantiated. While Lefebvre\u2019s main target were those philosophers of language, who collapsed the mental space into the words that formed it, Lefebvre suggests that mental space and physical space cannot be understood as two halves: they must be evaluated as a single system.<\/span><\/p>\n

Many players of <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> take the rules and goals of the game as suggestions. While the game suggests you \u201ccatch \u2018em all,\u201d some players are content with making fun of the game\u2019s inability to produce more than Weedles, Pidgeys and Rattatas. A whole new set of memes and macros used to convey disappointment, anger, and general absurdity take advantage of the universal experience that is only finding these three Pok\u00e9mon almost anywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, even while playing the game seriously, players are more heterogenous than anything else. Some players catch the cute Pok\u00e9mon; some players catch the Fire types; others play to socialize with friends. It is these heterogenous experiences that structure <\/span>Alexandra Samuel<\/span><\/a>\u2019s evaluation of the games cartographic implications. A key detail is the map\u2019s overlay and the information it lacks:<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the case of Pok\u00e9mon Go, the most noteworthy feature is the absence of any street names: your only navigation clues are nameless blocks and intersections and named landmarks. This makes Pok\u00e9mon Go far closer to pre-cartographic navigation by landmark than to modern wayfinding via street names and addresses.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The intent to take away information\u2013\u2013cross streets, or traffic patterns\u2013\u2013goes directly against Google Map\u2019s project to make travel from Point A to Point B as efficient as possible. If you want to hit up Gyms, or find Pok\u00e9Lures, a player must be willing to add five or ten minutes to a route. The reward, of course, might include levelling in the game. But it might also include meeting the group of players whose company you enjoyed at the past two Pok\u00e9Lures. My hike was only one of several neighborhood excursions, motivated by people I\u2019d met at the Lures, excitedly describing what they\u2019d found, and where they\u2019d met other players. Building my piece of this new Pok\u00e9mon world, hanging out with a group of Pok\u00e9mon trainers I would never have met otherwise, and exploring the entirety of New Haven\u2019s offerings have left me with a new map of the city, one much more memorable than would have been possible otherwise. <\/span><\/p>\n

Much like any facet of American culture in the twenty first century, the game is playable to the extent that someone wants to participate in American society. <\/span>Pok\u00e9mon Go<\/span><\/i> is neither a messianic salvation, nor is it an apocalyptic nightmare. It\u2019s a game whose possibilities of resistance and compliance are found with the people who interact with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marley-Vincent Lindsey is a PhD student at Brown, where he works on religion, economics, and ideas between Spain and Latin America in the sixteenth century. He uses this experience to ask what is new and old about human beings on the web, a question that is very dear to him. He occasionally\u00a0tweets<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My mom and I spent some part of the 1995 summer with my aunt and her house, complete with backyard. I was three, and having lived most of my life in a small New York studio apartment, my mom must\u2019ve thought I would enjoy the few elements of nature often found in quiet Californian suburbs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21487,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21481\/revisions\/21487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}