The Pokemon Game Brings People Together in a Physical Way

The other night while on a business trip in Seattle, I found myself wandering in a park with about 200 strangers. We were all searching for Pokémon. Just as important, we were also talking to each other. As one travel writer recently observed, Pokémon Go is a fantastic conversation starter.

Pokémon Go has gotten a lot of attention as an innovator in mobile gaming. I agree 100 percent—the game is incredibly innovative, but not for the reasons many people think. Augmented reality has been around for years. Ditto for mobile games. Even Pokémon Go's real world overlay builds on geocaching, a technology-driven scavenger hunt that itself builds on the old-fashioned scavenger hunts of past decades. In other words, the technology that powers Pokémon Go, just like the underlying media property, isn't really new. And yet the game represents a watershed moment in the history of gaming. Why? Because Pokémon Go creates a safe and fun context for real world social gaming—that's the game's most important breakthrough.

A return to social gaming in a shared physical space
I'm going to date myself here, but there was a time when gaming was inherently social because it required physical proximity. You went to the local arcade, put your quarter down on the Donkey Kong cabinet to save your space, and battled it out with a living, breathing, trash-talking opponent who stood right next to you. That social experience continued into the console era, even if those devices were built to accommodate single players gaming from their living rooms. One reason the social element continued even if it wasn't built into the hardware was that we're social animals, so we thought nothing of packing up our consoles or PCs and taking them to a friend's house or LAN party. Toward the end of that era, Nintendo even came out with the GameCube—a console that was built with portability in mind.

The rise of online gaming didn't put an end to social play, but the internet did change the dynamic. For most of this century, gamers have played together—separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, but connected via the Internet. Friends and strangers team up in Call of Duty mods, trash-talk across continents while playing Madden, and participate in virtual communities of MMORPGs. In one sense, we used an Internet connection as a hack for the hassle of lugging your hardware to a friend's house. But in doing so, we've sacrificed the joy of playing together in the same physical space. Gaming is still social, but it's often more isolating than we'd like.

What makes Pokémon Go so novel is that it taps into the shared physical experience of gaming that we've always loved. Game play frequently leads to new, real world connections. Visit a Pokémon Go gym and suddenly anyone with a phone is transformed from a stranger to a fellow player. Some of those connections are casual and fleeting, but others are lasting and meaningful. Most important of all, the overwhelming majority of Pokémon Go connections are safe. In effect, Pokémon Go has ushered in a global game on the scale of what's portrayed in the novel Ready Player One, but instead of a bleak and dangerous dystopian future, we're living in a giant video game where everything and everyone is playable.

A clear model for other brands to follow
Pokémon Go presents some rather obvious avenues for other brands to capitalize on the breakthrough. For example, one can easily imagine Lego or Minecraft releasing similar games that encourage players to join together in physical proximity to build a virtual world on top of the real one. Working in partnership with a real estate app, Monopoly could be adapted to the physical world and a typical suburban block could be transformed into the ultimate board game. For adults, bars could turn to games like Exploding Kittens to get patrons talking with each other, rather than disappearing into social media. Thanks to Pokémon Go, the industry will now be asking what the possibility is for real world social gaming with each new title.

It's still early days
Pokémon Go is a persistent world. New players and new territories are coming online, but just as important, the game will grow dynamically as creators and players devise new features and contests. Soon, we'll be talking about the world's Pokémon Go leader. Down the road, we'll see events like the sponsored release of a few branded Pikachus—think virtual collector's items—that will draw tens of thousands of players to travel to cities like New York or London to catch them all. As more money pours into the game, more scenarios become viable. There's no telling where Pokémon Go and games like it will ultimately lead because, in a very real sense, the game has escaped the device. But the question is no longer just who will these gamers will play with, it's where will they meet?