What Is Pokemon Go? - The Atlantic
Seen in the lineage of its ancestors, Pokémon Go isn’t what it seems on first blush. Billed as an augmented reality game, the title does offer an experience that blends computer graphics with live camera video. But that aspect of the title is entirely optional. Sure, it makes good on the delightful proposition of hunting Pokémon in the real, physical world, and at locations that correspond with the monsters’ various capacities. But mostly, it gives players appealing, local images to help endear others to the experience on social media—and thereby to spread the urge to play among others who’ve enjoyed Pokémon over the last two decades. For the creators of alternate reality games, pervasive games, big games, and all the other names that have been used to describe computer games played in and across real-world spaces, Pokémon Go represents a bittersweet victory. On the one hand, it shows that an unlikely combination of technology and social will has finally made a truly mass-market pervasive game possible. On the other hand, as Area/Code co-founder and current NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz told me, “such a victory was only possible thanks to years of corporate patronage from Google, along with the licensing of the most popular videogame IP of all time.”
