680015

research-article2017
MMC0010.1177/2050157916680015Mobile Media & CommunicationHjorth and Richardson

Guest editorial

Mobile Media & Communication

2017, Vol. 5(1) 3­–14
Pokémon GO: Mobile media © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2050157916680015
https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157916680015
digital wayfarer journals.sagepub.com/home/mmc

Larissa Hjorth
RMIT University, Australia

Ingrid Richardson
Murdoch University, Australia

Abstract
This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these
divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand
and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of
playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware
technologies in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016),
risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016) to the role of mobile
media in commodifying (Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and
creative dimensions of play (Isbister, 2016; Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and
game theorists in this commentary highlight, the game sits at the nexus of several
technological and cultural trajectories: the playful turn; the ubiquity of location-based
and haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects
of digital mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and
art; our individual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes;
the increasing importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the
ongoing augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid
experience of the lifeworld.

Keywords
augmented reality, games, locative media, mobile games, mobile media

Corresponding author:
Larissa Hjorth, School of Media & Communication, RMIT University, Building 9, level 4, Melbourne,
Victoria, 3067, Australia.
Email: larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au
4 Mobile Media & Communication 5(1)

Over the first weeks of July 2016, a strange phenomenon began to unfold. People across
several countries downloaded the Pokémon GO app and entered an augmented reality
(AR), wandering their neighbourhoods and public spaces in search of Pokémon and
pokestops, and competing with other players at virtual Pokémon gyms. In this hybrid
reality (de Souza e Silva, 2006), users are required to move through physical space as
they tag, collect, trade, and battle for digital artefacts and player achievements, accessing
a microworld through their smartphone via the digital overlay of game objects and vir-
tual locations across the actual environment.
Through this augmented layering of the digital onto place, banal and familiar sur-
roundings are transformed to become significant game loci. A Pokémon can be found
and caught in one’s own bathroom, a gym or pokestop might be situated at the local
library, cafe, or graveyard. The popularity of Pokémon GO—touted as the first ever
really successful location-based game1—has already been the subject of much criticism
and celebration. As the ludified dust settles on the Pokémon GO phenomenon, it is clear
that the game and its uptake is situated within historical, social, and cultural contexts. Far
from coming out of nowhere, Pokémon GO has brought together decades of mobile
media, locative arts, gaming, and Japanese culture.
Since the launch of Pokémon GO in July 2016, media outlets from The Atlantic to The
Overland have scrambled to have their say on this playful phenomenon from a variety of
perspectives, from the productive social dimensions of games, to the darker debates
around isolation, safety, surveillance and risk. For some, Pokémon GO is a positive expe-
rience—the gameplay evokes 20-something nostalgia (McCrea, XXXX; Surman, 2009),
encourages physical exercise, facilitates “genuine human-to-human interaction” (Wawro,
2016), and effectively enhances our sense of wellbeing (“Turns out Pokémon GO,”
2016). For others, the game forces us to reflect on the ongoing gendered, racial, socio-
economic, age-based, and bodily inequities of urban mobility that affect many of us on a
daily basis (Isbister, 2016).
More philosophically, for game critic Bogost (2016), there’s “something fundamen-
tally revolting about celebrating the Pokémonisation of the globe as the ultimate reali-
sation of the merged social and technological potential of modern life.” Thus, there are
complications to this “social revolution” of hybrid or augmented reality gaming within
mainstream media cultures. The culture, place, identity, and embodiment of the player
all inform their experience of Pokémon GO, highlighting the uneven politics of mobile
games and everyday play and their intrinsic relationship to power (Machkovech,
2016). We are reminded again of the irreducible variability, specificity, and context of
all media use.
This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these
debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically
interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media.
As noted elsewhere, understanding a phenomenon such as Pokémon GO as a “cultural
moment” (Hjorth, Burgess, & Richardson, 2009) allows us access into an array of social,
cultural, political, and economic factors. The issues pertaining to Pokémon GO as a cul-
tural moment move across debates concerning the effect of location-aware technologies
in constructions of privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance
(Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016), and the role of mobile media in commodifying
Hjorth and Richardson 5

(Evangelho, 2016) and expanding the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of play
(Isbister, 2016; Mäyrä, 2012). As the mobile media and game theorists in this commen-
tary highlight, Pokémon GO sits at the nexus of several technological and cultural trajec-
tories: the playful turn in contemporary media culture; the ubiquity of location-based and
haptic mobile media (and apps and games); innovative game design; the effects of digital
mapping technologies; the intertwining of performative media games and art; our indi-
vidual and collective memories of playworlds and transmedia universes; the increasing
importance of issues concerning privacy and risk in public spaces; the ongoing digital
and networked augmentation of place and space; and the politics embedded in this hybrid
experience of the lifeworld.
Mobile gaming is shaped as much by the local as the global (Hjorth & Richardson,
2014). Locations like Japan have a long history in a particular version of mobile gaming
(Hjorth, 2006; Hjorth & Richardson, 2014) whereby the kawaii (cute) is deployed to
make familiar unfamiliar new media forms (Hjorth, 2003, 2008). We have previously
documented how mobile media create new modes of engagement that entangle attention
and distraction in ways that can be understood as “ambient” (Hjorth & Richardson,
2014). The notion of “ambient play” seeks to contextualise mobile games within the
rhythms of everyday life. Mobile location-based and augmented reality games such as
Pokémon GO are manifestly ambient, as they become embedded in our daily routines,
pedestrian movement, and interaction with the familiar strangers populating our neigh-
bourhoods and urban spaces.
In a very fundamental way the mobile interface modifies what we pay attention to,
what we “turn to” and face (and turn away from) in the everyday lifeworld, and the
modalities and duration of that attentiveness. This is clearly evidenced by the wide-scale
integration of casual mobile games such as Candy Crush and Angry Birds into our daily
lives (Keogh & Richardson, in press), but even more significantly and poignantly in our
involvement with location-based hybrid reality games such as Pokémon GO; games that
require us to adopt an “as-if” structure of experience, moving through the environment
“as if” it were game terrain or an urban playground. That is, Pokémon GO is not just a
casual mobile game, for while we might play it in the midst of other daily activities, it
also explicitly intervenes with and modifies those activities and relations—sometimes in
positive ways, sometimes negative (Bliss, 2016). Mobile location-based games can
accentuate feelings of loneliness and inaccessibility for those less physically mobile, or
facilitate connection with other players; it can encourage exploration and discovery, but
increase danger and risk for those disempowered, marginalised, or stigmatised.
As Lee Humphries identifies in this issue (XXXX), the effects of media interfaces on
social interaction are always complex. Pokémon GO, as with mobile media more gener-
ally, can be flexibly deployed by users as a means to facilitate social interaction, or as a
“shield” to avoid engagement with others in public spaces. For Miguel Sicart (XXXX),
while Pokémon GO may open up new possibilities for design and play in augmented
reality, we should be wary of the potential for corporate appropriation of public spaces
enabled by the game. These debates have a long history in and around locative media; as
Adriana de Souza e Silva points out in her commentary (XXXX), Pokémon GO recalls
issues relating to mobility, sociability, spatiality, and surveillance that are characteristic
of many previous hybrid reality games and mobile location-based applications. For
6 Mobile Media & Communication 5(1)

example, as the website “Please Rob Me” highlighted, there are risks associated with
tagging and publicising information about one’s location.
In this editor’s Introduction to the special commentary, we seek to contextualise these
debates around Pokémon GO as part of broader sociocultural and historical assemblages.
In order to do so, we firstly situate Pokémon GO in a conceptual framework that links
mobility and media practices more broadly, and outlines the relationality of place, car-
tography, and play. Second, we revisit the concept of the digital wayfarer to make sense
of the Pokémon GO phenomenon. Lastly, we conclude by reflecting upon the dialectic of
empowerment and exploitation that is central to many of the practices surrounding
mobile games (de Souza e Silva & Hjorth, 2009).

Play, place-making, and media practice

Through the enactments of digital, nondigital, and hybrid forms of play (de Souza e Silva
& Sutko, 2010), we effectively generate spaces to consider, reflect, and rethink our mun-
dane and intimate practices and how they are emplaced, or integral to how we dynami-
cally perceive and “make” place. There has been much work of late into the notion of
“critical cartography”—that is, the idea that we shape maps and our geo-cultural terrain
as much as they shape us. As media become more mobile and playful, and games embed
geo-locative data, we increasingly interweave our everyday experience of place with
playful virtual environments. Place, as it is enacted through play, highlights the collabo-
rative, performative, and creative dimensions of cartography (Perkins, 2009; Verhoeff,
2013; Wilmott, 2013). Critical cartography challenges the authority of traditional map-
ping practices that present limited and static readings of geography. Instead, it explores
new mapping practices and applies theoretical critique to investigate the complex entan-
glements between geography and media in everyday life. With developments in mobile
technologies and the rise of collaborative platforms, making and sharing maps has taken
on new playful, ambient, and copresent dimensions.
In this positive and productive sense, mobile urban games such as Pokémon GO can
be seen as illustrative of the playful way in which we collectively and creatively “per-
form” place and our social selves. Yet as we review the earlier scholarly writing on
Pokémon as a global (or glocalised [Robertson, 1995]) phenomenon (Allison, 2003,
2006), we are also reminded of the inherently spatial and mobile nature of popular cul-
ture and media, and how popular culture forms have always been “intimately, contin-
gently and formatively co-implicated with/in everyday geographies” (Horton, 2012, pp.
11–12). In bringing together childhood and play studies with human geography, for
example, Horton (2012) documents how his young research participants integrated
Pokémon play into the structure of their mundane spatial practices and daily space-time
routines, effectively remaking their homes, local shops, and neighbourhoods as inter-
volved with the Pokémon universe. In this special section, Seth Giddings (XXXX) pro-
vides further critical insight into the “distributed imagination” involved in both children’s
and adult play (as something that is both technosocial and collectively realised), and in
this context considers Pokémon GO as part of the successful evolution of Pokémon as a
transmedia platform.
Hjorth and Richardson 7

As other theorists have also noted (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 2003), playing with
Pokémon necessitates activity (knowledge-gathering, collecting, nurturing, competing,
and cooperating), and has also embedded portability into that activity (through trading
cards, Game Boy and dual screen [DS] games); indeed, Pokémon are literally “pocket
monsters” populating a portable microworld (Allison, 2003). In this sense, Pokémon GO
can be seen as another instance of the way the “stuff” of media permeates our everyday
geographies, and an actualisation of the location-based and augmented reality experi-
enced by children over 10 years ago. We could argue that our realities have always been
augmented in a fundamental way by our collective and individual imaginaries, and more
recently (as exemplified by Pokémon GO), by the instrumental and mediatic extension of
our narrative worlds through (mobile) media games.
Play has of late undergone a renaissance. Once conflated with a child’s activity
(Piaget, 1999), educational tool (Vygotsky, 1978), or gameplay, play over the last dec-
ade has come to the attention of many researchers across disciplines such as art, new
media, and game studies (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006; Sicart, 2014). And yet, play schol-
arship has a long and rich history (Caillois & Barash, 1961; Huizinga, 1955) that was
rekindled through the work of Salen and Zimmerman (2003). As games scholar Miguel
Sicart (2014) observed in Play Matters, within contemporary practices across design,
games, architecture, and art, the playful has become a pivotal attitude in the expression
of the contemporary.
Play also has a long history as an interdisciplinary and poetic “cultural probe”
(Gaver, Dunne, & Pacnti, 1999; Malaby, 2009). More recently games such as Minecraft
(a remediated digital form of Lego) have become key vehicles for contemporary media
literacy workshops (Hill, 2015; Hooper & de Byl, 2014; Ito, 2015). In these contexts,
the impact of mobile media upon everyday play is now well recognised. As Frans
Mäyrä comments in this special section (XXXX), the success of Pokémon GO is in
part an effect of the playful turn in contemporary media culture, and exemplifies deep
connections between (mobile) technology, the game’s storyworld, and the sedimenta-
tion of cultural knowledges around popular media microworlds. For Brendan Keogh
(XXXX), Pokémon GO represents a “perfect storm” in which the ubiquity of the
smartphone and its deep impact on our everyday media and play practices, has con-
verged with “big” location-based data (accrued through Niantic’s earlier game Ingress),
and Pokémon’s successful branding and design.
However, the more utopian renditions of play and playfulness have their critics. For
example, in human computer interaction (HCI) the playful has often been evoked in the
form of gamification—that is, where media are given a game-like quality (Deterding,
Dixon, Khlaed, & Nacke, 2011). Much of the designing around the qualified self (QS)
takes up this playful, creative attitude (Lupton, 2016; Neff & Nafus, 2016). In this sense,
contemporary play lays bare the very paradoxical nature of new media—the double-
edged sword of empowerment versus exploitation. This situation is magnified in the case
of digital and creative labour, which as Scholz (2012) observes is riddled with paradoxes
whereby the Internet can be understood as both a playground and factory. These para-
doxes are everywhere within contemporary media’s inherent playfulness (Sicart, 2014)
and the attendant “playbour” practices.
8 Mobile Media & Communication 5(1)

For Julian Kücklich (2005), the term “playbour” describes the various kinds of work
players engage in, whether it consists of generating game content through social play,
contributing to game paratexts by participating in online commentary or uploading walk-
throughs, or creating and sharing modifications (mods) of existing games. As Kücklich
(2005) noted, players invest much social, creative, and cultural capital into modding,
which is then transformed into financial capital by game development and production
companies.
Similarly, in this special section, Dal Yong Jin (XXXX) considers the economies of
web-based media and the commodification of digital games, arguing that Pokémon GO
generates value to developers and companies through the free immaterial labour of play-
ers, intensifying the “new capitalism” that increasingly typifies our use of online services
and applications. In a more positive light, Jordan Frith (XXXX) explores the “commer-
cial potential of augmented reality,” and how Pokémon GO can be used by businesses to
attract foot traffic through the placement of “lures,” revealing how digital “objects” can
influence our movement and behaviour in the physical world, as we enact the pedestrian
labour of location-based gaming.
These ambiguities around play, commerce, and labour have indeed been amplified by
the gamification of contemporary life, and the way social and reward-based game
mechanics are embedded into business software applications and self-monitoring apps,
primarily for increased profit and productivity. It could be argued that Pokémon GO typi-
fies both gamification principles (i.e., the player accrues items and gains rewards the
more they play, and play with others), and playbour (the player, who is co-opted into
generating game content, works to enrich the game experience).
More broadly, we must situate both play and media within a sociocultural history
(Sutton-Smith, 1997). The kawaii (cute) politics of Pokémon GO in Japan has a long
tradition that links to 1970s subcultures and subversive practices. The kawaii within
mobile cultures (Allison, 2003, 2006; Frank, 2001; Hjorth, 2003; Ito, 2006; Kinsella,
1995), for example, have played an important role in gender subversion and linking
new media into broader mundane practices of the everyday, extending to the rise of
emojis as part of the increasingly affective labour of digital culture. Pokémon GO not
only capitalises on this long history of “cute,” but also on the nostalgia politics sur-
rounding the Pokémon phenomenon more broadly (Surman, 2009). For David Surman
(2009), Pokémon kawaii aesthetics play into a particular emotional-aesthetic register
that he links to the Freudian uncanny valley. However, Pokémon GO also relies on
more than this; as Christian McCrea (XXXX) identifies in his commentary, Pokémon
is an expansive mobile game platform in its own right (firmly established by six gen-
erations of Game Boy and DS games) and participating in the Pokémon universe
demands the “deep agency” of players and accrual of experiential play knowledge that
can potentially span several decades.
Pokémon GO clearly taps into the nostalgia of older generations for which videogame
entry was synonymous with kawaii cultures. Scholars such as Iwabuchi (2003) have
identified the specific “glocal” dynamics of Japanese commodities (i.e., globally distrib-
uted yet with a local complexion) that can be linked back to the Sony Walkman and the
work of Roland Robertson (1995). However, as McCrea (XXXX) reveals, the game also
connects new and younger audiences to this culture, creating a different layering of
Hjorth and Richardson 9

nostalgia and affect through established digital design and game aesthetics. Pokémon
GO’s particular relationship to mobile media, and to both past and emerging play cul-
tures, places it within broader sociocultural contexts, technological histories, and urban
geographies. In the next section we further theorise the gameplay of Pokémon GO as a
mode of digital wayfaring.

Digital wayfaring: The politics of embodied practice

For Hjorth and Pink (2014), contemporary entanglements between the online and offline
can be interpreted through the conceptual and embodied metaphor of digital wayfaring.
They argue that the increasingly ubiquitous and hybrid online–offline domain of quotid-
ian life must be examined in terms of the relation between the representational and the
nonrepresentational in the constitution and experience of place. Revising Tim Ingold’s
notion of wayfaring as a type of mobility that is both routine and repetitive (e.g., com-
muting), Pink and Hjorth reflect upon the way in which the digital entangles itself in our
everyday practices and movements, especially through mobile media.
The experience of digital wayfaring is further complicated within a hybrid reality
game. In particular, sometimes the rules of the physical are not easily adapted into the
game world and vice versa, and the game activity can defamiliarise the routine habits
of urban mobility. In this context, there has been significant work within what has been
called the new games movement by play design scholars. Often referred to as the New
Arcade (and sometimes the Modern Arcade, Indie Arcade, Neo Arcade, and DIY
Arcade), it is a cultural movement that celebrates the gathering and playing of contem-
porary videogames in social and public contexts. These games are often designed by
independent makers and seek to highlight and challenge the collective and physical
dimensions of game play. However, as Miguel Sicart (2014) has highlighted, many of
the festivals and events that feature such games often reveal the inequities of public
playfulness, especially when players are required to challenge conventional ways of
being in urban spaces. Here it is important to highlight the uneven ways players come
to the game space and the complexity of gameplay as it is interwoven with our cultural
and corporeal “situatedness” in the world. That is, certain bodies have more latitude to
deviate from normalised practices, while some—as Katie Salen (XXXX) demonstrates
in this special issue—don’t.
Salen turns to the potential disempowerment and marginalisation that affects players
of AR games and mobile location-based apps such as Pokémon GO. That is, Pokémon
GO requires users to explore their (sub)urban environment as a mode of hybridised way-
faring, enacting a form of gameplay that is underscored by issues of racial inequity and
the relative freedom people have to move playfully through their neighbourhoods and
cities. Salen asks, what can Pokémon GO teach us about mobility, accessibility, race, and
privilege? It is clearly more dangerous for some bodies to be in some places at certain
times, and there is undoubtedly a hierarchy of risk at work that acts upon our bodies dif-
ferently, depending on our age, gender, ethnicity, or social milieu. Sometimes the inequi-
ties of our embodiment can be playfully resisted and subverted, while at others they
reinforce existing boundaries and delimit our wayfaring practices in digital, actual,
hybrid, and augmented realities.
10 Mobile Media & Communication 5(1)

The social orchestration of playful performativity around urban cartography has a

long history that has been harnessed by Pokémon GO to new levels of mainstream uptake
previously unheard of for urban games. On the one hand, Pokémon GO highlights the
powerful role of the playful in contemporary media, and the consolidation of decades of
urban and hybrid reality gaming and place-making experimentation. On the other hand,
we might argue that Pokémon GO play is a rather impoverished form of digital wayfar-
ing, as players are narrowly goal-oriented, driven to collect and compete for virtual items
as they engage in what is essentially a gamified activity—a simplified reduction of a
popular but fairly complex trading game that was originally targeted at preteens. In this
view, the Pokémon experience—as appealing as it may be to contain and control an
imaginary microworld—is not an interventionist strategy but rather a transformation of
the local environment into a game resource, where place is literally made relevant by the
extent to which it is populated by virtual currency, game objects, and rewards.

Iterative conclusions on the rise of urban gaming

This special section of Mobile Media & Communication has sought to put Pokémon GO
in context—historically, culturally, socially, and politically. To understand this moment
we have framed it in terms of continuities and discontinuities, and not simply as some-
thing “new,” as so much new media is often situated. As Wendy Chun (2016) identifies,
in keeping with approaches like domestication or media archaeology, we need to reflex-
ively analyse new media when it becomes part of the mundane repertoire of the everyday.
As the Pokémon GO phenomenon settles within our banal practices, we can reflect again
on the complexities of mobile location-based play within what Raessens (2006) and
Mäyrä (2016) have discerned as the broader ludification and affectivity of digital
culture.
For Christian Licoppe (XXXX, in this special section), Pokémon GO must be consid-
ered in the context of earlier location-based games and mobile-based urban play, and he
insightfully situates the hyperrealism of augmented reality, the lack of social functional-
ity, and unprecedented scale of Pokémon GO, in light of his earlier ethnographic work on
Mogi. Similarly, de Souza e Silva and Hjorth (2009) have argued that to understand
contemporary mobile games we should historicise the phenomenon in terms of urban
and mediatic transformations around play, space, and place. While the mobile media user
is “unable to break free of a capitalist interpellation” determined by the corporate infra-
structures of mobile hardware and software, they suggest that through “playful resist-
ance” we can engage in local forms of subversion (de Souza e Silva & Hjorth, 2009) or
“critical play” (Flanagan, 2009). This dialectic of exploitation and empowerment is per-
tinent to Pokémon GO and location-aware mobile games more broadly. On the positive
and potentially subversive side, players can use such games to activate communities of
interest in local contexts, organise urban events and public demonstrations of play. On
the negative side, many Pokémon GO players have unknowingly shared private informa-
tion that we would assume is secure (i.e., iOS users logging into Pokémon GO through
Google and sharing their Gmail account information, a security breach since rectified).
Indeed, in the case of games such as Ingress, Foursquare, and Pokémon GO we can
Hjorth and Richardson 11

acknowledge that there are both benefits and risks in the accrual and deployment of user
data en masse in the service of an enriched AR game experience.
As we grapple with the effects, affects, and implications of Pokémon GO’s massive
uptake, recent reports indicate that it is undergoing rapid decline and “losing the battle
for mobile mindshare” (Kawa & Katz, 2016). Daily active users (DAUs) have dropped
from 45 million to 30 million in just 1 month (from July to August 2016), due to ongoing
glitches, server problems, monotonous mechanics, and a lack of features that don’t rep-
resent the Pokémon universe’s real complexity. Despite this downturn, which certainly
typifies the precariousness terrain of free-to-play and freemium mobile games, this “cul-
tural moment” in mobile media and gaming history is nevertheless significant. By con-
sidering Pokémon GO as a cultural moment, it allows us as researchers to better
understand and interpret the entanglements of mobile media use, play, and games in
quotidian life.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research is part of a broader Australian Research Council
Discovery grant called Games of Being Mobile (DP140104295): http://gamesofbeingmobile.com/.
This grant is a longitudinal ethnographic study into mobile games within Australian households.

Note
1. In the US alone, it has been estimated there has been 7.5 million downloads of Pokémon GO
since its July 6 release, which Bliss (2016) argues constitutes a “bona fide” craze.

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Author biographies
Larissa Hjorth is an artist and digital ethnographer in the School of Media & Communication at
RMIT University. Hjorth has two decades experience working in cross-cultural, interdisciplinary,
collaborative creative practice and innovative new media research.
Ingrid Richardson is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at Murdoch University. Richardson
has a broad interest in the social and cultural aspects of the ‘human-technology relation’, ranging
from scientific and medical technovision, virtual and augmented reality, to interactive media,
games, mobile media, urban screens, the internet and web-based communication.