Pokémon GO: augmented economy

Since 1995, kids and kids at heart all over the world have wanted to be the very best, like no one ever was. Armed with Gameboys, Pokéballs and trading cables, young wannabe Pokémasters ventured through pixels of fields of wild Pokémon, hoping to indeed catch them all. As technology developed and new consoles began to take place of the old, Pokémon continued to live on yet lost its state of prominence.

What started as an April Fool's prank named Pokémon Challenge back on the 31st of March in 2014 (see video below), Pokémon GO has most literally taken over the world, both enhancing it and making it weirder. The team at Niantic found a way to merge what we love with what we do all day whilst retaining our sense of mobility. People of the twenty-first century are seldom seen without their mobile phones, and seldom seen away from other technological devices, and are, in turn, lacking movement, lacking exercise and lacking an exposure of the sun - not to mention the lack of a social life, or a physical social life at that. The developers of Pokémon GO, Saturo Iwata, Tsunekazu Ishihara and Tatsuo Nomura have collectively found a way to merge the lack of these human needs into one technological hybrid monster, attracting clusters of fanatics and non-fanatics alike. The three have combined the concept of Pokémon, the use of mobile phone interfaces, along with Google Maps to create a cyber world that nestles neatly into our real life world, allowing users to immerse themselves in a reality that incorporates the realities of their friends and other users, as well as the cyber-reality of several pixelated beings which humans, for some reason, wish to have in their polarised possession.

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If there is one thing I have noticed about the new digital craze that is Pokémon GO, it's that these lucky developers have found a successful way to reel in augmented reality into our realities without yet harnessing other popular digital crazes, such as virtual reality (VR). Since its release, Nintendo's stock value has increased. This economic combustion of an app has brought increases that Nintendo have not acquired since 1983, adding a whopping 7.5 billion dollars to its shares, and has been acquiring a daily revenue of 1.6 million dollars. But what does that mean to us, the people who have been sucked into this virtual world? Well, nothing. Yes, you Aussie, New Zealander or American, can shrug it off, because all you did was jump onto your app store, whether you are an iPhone or Android user, and downloaded this eccentric app for free. Who cares, though, right? It's Pokémon and it's awesome and it's yours at the touch of a screen.

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It may be hard to believe, but Pokémon GO has even defeated the popularity of social networking monsters Tinder and Twitter, based on recent figures. It seems that chasing and collecting imaginary monsters is more popular than chasing our lives and goals and building our relationships with other people. While this game allows you to be social and to leave the house, it also ensnares you in a world that merely represents your own. 

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But I hold mixed feelings about Pokémon GO. While it annoys me that people choose to invest in the abandonment of reality, it still utilises an aspect of reality. People are lacking creativity because of thriving as far as the creative bar that Niantic has raised instead of creating their own modes of existence, however some people are already finding ways to add to this digital jungle. It seems, though, that ultimately, people are veering further and further away from being human and redirecting their journeying towards partaking in a uniform robotic monotonous society. I mean, isn't that what capitalism is all about? This is another example of the nerdy sector of the bourgeoise luring in the nerdy proletariats, but on a far greater scale. Don't be fooled by the so-called 'benefits' an augmented reality has to offer, because at the loss of allowed monthly mobile data, at the stopping of wifi and at the death of your mobile phone battery, you will come to realise that you have not at all actually progressed, and that your digital accolades actually amount to nothing at all. Really, what are you getting out of this, apart from a bout of procrastination from whatever it is that you have put on hold? I wonder what Karl Marx would think of Pokémon GO. 

Pokémon GO.
Capitalism GO.
Humanity GONE.