Fotoarena/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.On 6 July 2016, San Francisco-based software developers Niantic, Inc. released the unexpected smash-hit game of the summer, Pokémon GO (PoGo). Its success was instant, even as its unexpectedly overburdened servers made gameplay lag, became unpredictable, and, often, frustrating. Since its inception in 1996, the Pokémon franchise of games, television shows, movies, and manga had counted children as its primary demographic, but this new PoGo app was met with surprising intergenerational appeal, drawing into the streets everyone from school-age kids on summer break to gen-Xers and millennials looking for a post-work activity.
On the one hand, it is easy to reduce PoGo’s phenomenal success to its high brand visibility and the game’s ability to connect people’s favourite mobile devices (smartphones) to a favourite multi-platform franchise (Pokémon) through a timely and fun killer app. But any view of the game’s impact that takes into consideration aspects of race and space in American civil society raises a number of serious concerns that we should not ignore. We cannot celebrate PoGo’s success without also examining its limitations – the ways in which the app itself both inherently excludes poor communities of colour and reinforces racial discourses that contrast ‘safe’, white spaces with ‘dangerous’, minority ghettos.
Throughout the summer of 2016, discussions of PoGo dominated social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Periscope, for instance), with fans and foes of the phenomenon weighing in from utopian and dystopian perspectives. For some, the PoGo app offered: a unique opportunity for exploration of one’s hometown, a practical solution to obesity among gamers, a means of alleviating mental illness symptoms like depression and agoraphobia, or simply an entertaining diversion. For others, the game represented the worst elements of American culture: phone-obsessed zombies wandering into busy traffic without looking up, friends staring at their phones in lieu of talking to each other, or a mass hive mind of followers more interested in silly distractions than in facing the real world.
