So my family are currently enjoying this game at the moment. And according to my Facebook feed the rest of Australia is too. I even heard an advisory from the Victorian Police on the radio expressing safety concerns over people playing the game while driving, crossing tram lines and so on.
So, what things can we draw from it? Here is a list I’ve gathered, in no particular order.
Popular IP wins
Bugs aren’t that big a deal if your app is popular enough
Players don’t have to be constantly engaged, it’s legit to have a game with nothing to do
Even dodgy AR is cool
Incorporating real social elements instead of social networks is great.
There is a market for games that encourage walking and exercise
That’s a bit of a brain dump, what do people think of the app?
I forgot about the geo release. It’s been pretty much dominant on social media here.
To bring others up to speed if you haven’t played it yet:
The game is a casual Pokemon game, based entirely on geolocation services. Players use Pokeballs to catch Pokemon, who move about in the real world. Different world areas have different Pokemon, so a beach or river will have water types, suburbia has tonnes of rattata, pidgeys and so on.
Once a Pokemon is located the app opens up the users camera, and places the Pokemon on top of a real world feed. Thus you can catch a pidgey sitting on someone’s shoulder, a rattata in the bathtub, a Machoke standing by the mailbox and so on.
The game also has PokeStops and Gyms, which are attatched to real world land marks. The cafe across the road is a PokeStop, as is the park my daughter plays at. The local shopping centre has a gym. And so on. At PokeStops players get free items, at Gyms they can battle other trainers Pokemon.
All of this has had some fascinating real world impacts. There are more people out in the streets and in the local parks. I’ve had several conversations with relative strangers asking if anyone has seen the evee I was tracking. Then there are cases where thousands of people turn up at a monument after rumours of a zaptos sighting.
And of course there are some darker real world implications too. People playing while driving. Lures being used to attract people for muggings.
Either way the game is having some significant levels of social impact here. It’s ironic that the same IP that kept us inside as kids is now getting our children outside again.
Not sure on this one. I’m curious to drive out to a small town now and investigate. I would imagine the pokemon distribution would be about the same, but access to gymns and PokeStops might be harder. Then again, if they distributed then roughly evenly by geography being in a small town might be an advantage.
The main lesson is that brand is also a social mechanics. first pokemon hit america in 1995, we are now 21 years after that, the diffusion of the brand is enough to spark conversation, the world is well known and not obscure, ie they are able to get reference immediately because of the brand, the game don’t play on obscure reference at all so nobody is left. 10 years kid in the 90s are now 30s, brand still popular among kid 20 years after, now generations can talk about the same subjects, from 10 up to 40.
Other than that, it’s a subgenre of arg, ingress was successful, we had these kind of game for a decade now. Brand is the main difference.
Some of our homeschool mom’s play the game too so it isn’t just kids. It sounds neat to me mostly because we do geocaching and it seems similar.
However, the driving while texting and talking is already so bad here and causes so many accidents. That worries me. It seems whenever I get behind a swaying, slow moving car on the interstate, it is always someone texting or sometimes even using a laptop…or an elderly person, lots of those in Florida. lol
I remember when a wobbly car almost always meant an intoxicated person. Now days it is often just a very foolish person.
This is what makes the game a unique experience for me. The idea of actually meeting your allies and opponents face to face, along with the number of players that only an IP as large as Pokemon can bring in creates an experience that we really haven’t seen before.
On the other hand, there are quite a few safety issues that the game has. Due to the game’s nature of promoting travel, I’ve seen a ton of people this weekend driving and playing the game. Also, people are constantly looking at their phones while walking, which has some obvious consequences.
I live in the countryside in the UK and i can tell you it’s absolutely terrible. You have to walk for 10 minutes to find the nearest pokemon to catch and there’s only one of those “pokestop” things walking distance from where i live, and i have no idea where i’d have to go to find the nearest gym. I’ve heard that they’re using some sort of population density map of some sort to balance the spawn rates, but honestly it’s not worth even playing the game unless you live near enough to a town or city to have a high enough spawn rate to play it.
Part of the problem with the distances as well is that it looks like they simply copied over their Ingress “portal” locations, which if IIRC, were largely out sourced to the players to submit back to Niantic to be turned into in game locations. So if your rural location didn’t have a lot (or any) Ingress players, then its possible you’ll be heavily lacking in the Pokestop department.
My Twitter & Facebook feeds have been full of Pokemon go. There was a large gathering in Sydney on the weekend that had about 1000 people meetup & schlepp around the city chasing Pokemon.
The funniest things are the errors that are popping up:
some guys house had been mis-tagged as a church on whatever the devs used to identify public spaces & he found out that in the game his house was a Pokemon gym so he had all these people around his yard looking for Pokemon at all hours.
in New Zealand a Hells Angels clubhouse/bar was labelled as a Pokemon gym so all these ‘normal’ people were walking in looking through their phones without paying attention to where they actually were & the potential danger they were in.
I can’t speak for LaneFox, but the game has plenty of stuff to dislike. It is extremely buggy (battling a gym or catching a pokemon bugs out about 30% of the time for me), and has pretty awful combat and pokemon catching system. Using something similar to the combat system from regular pokemon games would have been way better, and I think it is simple enough for a mobile game. The game seems to want you to track down pokemon, but the whole 1, 2, or 3 footprint system for how far away they are is vague and inconsistent. Giving you actual distance in feet, or an arrow pointing in what direction it is in would be way better.
The whole “Pokemon in real life” concept is pretty hard to mess up, but in my opinion they messed it up. Just making it a regular pokemon game where you have to physically walk around and can see pokemon with AR, but is similar (with a few simplifications) in basically every other way would have been much better.
It sounds neat to me mostly because we do geocaching and it seems similar.
