Unless your reality begins somewhere between 1996 and now, you might not understand meandering around town searching for those cute cartoon critters we call Pokemon.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t, so I was surprised to learn recently that 40 percent of adults who downloaded “Pokemon Go,” according to data from StartApp, a company that tracks 600 million users for downloads and social usage, are older than my 25-year-old baby girl.
But it isn't a new thing, said Shira Chess, an assistant professor of media arts at the University of Georgia.
What is new, she said, is the collective cultural excitement surrounding the game.
Launched just weeks ago, there’s no doubt “Pokemon Go” is one of the most effective uses of multiple technological shifts that have occurred in the past five years.
But the mobile game is based on its older cousin "Ingress," developed by Google geolocation engineers and released to the public in December 2013.
The game takes the structural format and integrates a game space that many millennials are already familiar with, Chess said. By using the “Ingress” base, she said, developer Niantic essentially had three years of productive play-testing and data gathering.
But Chess said that people soon got bored with “Ingress.”
“‘Ingress’ thematically didn’t quite hit the right note,” she said. “It’s hard to say why for sure, but the game wasn’t very accessible to new players.”
Even with its few glitches — the servers have been known to become overwhelmed with too many people playing at once — "Pokemon Go" is right now far more popular than "Ingress" ever was.
“It has a lot of cute little characters,” Chess said. “It also has this broad millennial appeal. Because many of them grew up with Pokemon, it has this built-in nostalgia to it.”
Still, “Pokemon Go” essentially adds a new skin to an old thing. The portals that were part of “Ingress” are now Pokestops. And the idea of capturing Pokemon is entirely new.
And quite fun, I hear.
“I would argue it’s those cute little critters wandering around that make this game so popular,” Chess said. “Not everybody is doing the gym stuff. Some people are just collecting Pokemons because they’re cute.”
As with earlier Pokemon games, “Pokemon Go” players throw virtual balls to capture “pocket monsters,” or Pokemon. They can be used to defend gyms, where the creatures train to become stronger. Rivals can try to take over the gym by using their own monsters to attack the gym’s protectors.
But the new game will also force players to look beyond their screens and visit places in the real world. As in “Ingress,” places like parks, historical markers, libraries, churches and commuter stations will hold valuable items in the game, retrievable only when physically close to the locations.
That’s the thing Chess likes most about this new version.
“I think it’s great that it’s getting people out and talking to one another and moving around,” she said. “It’s giving people a reason to talk to one another while they are interfacing on their mobile devices. I think that’s a great thing because it’s a great example of how technology can bring us all together.”
At 43, Chess said she didn’t grow up playing Pokemon, but she immediately downloaded “Pokemon Go” to her smartphone.
“I’m enjoying this and at the moment, at least, I see more positives than negatives,” she said.
The big negative is that our devices are making us less social in the real world. For Chess, though, “Pokemon Go” is a good example of how as we adapt alongside those technologies, we can come up with some pretty incredible things.
“I don’t know how long this will last,” she said. “This is a fad for sure; however, I would be surprised if when classes start in the fall, this doesn’t become a major way incoming freshmen and students socialize with one another, and that’s really cool.”
As long as they’re moving, talking and watching where they’re going, I’d have to agree.
