Month: March 2017

During the weekend, I tried playing Pokémon Go while it was sunny outside and walked to Hendrick’s Park with one of my friends. I tried tapping on one of the Pokémon stops along the way and couldn’t access the items due to a sudden lack of internet connection. There weren’t many stops along the way to this park, unfortunately. There was a lot more at Riverfront Park probably because it’s more well-known. The most exciting moment I had while playing Pokémon Go, overall, was seeing one of the eggs hatch. A Pollywog was born, which was rather anti-climactic since I had already captured one of those at that point. The slogan for Pokémon Go is: “Gotta catch ‘em all” but no, you really don’t. It may be encouraged but it’s not mandatory. I think that if you catch enough of one type of Pokémon, you can level one of them up. I haven’t bothered to try it. Whenever I collect more than one type of Pokémon, it’s usually because I think it looks cool.

This game was the most infuriating one that I’ve played for the class. I found Pokémon Go more of an inconvenience than anything else. The player has to go out of their way (to the stops for balls and berries) to progress through the game without an end goal. Most of the time I couldn’t even open the app. I’m curious to see if the game will become more popular during the summer. When it first released, the app was a hit but I don’t think it will be as widely played partly due to the crashing and partly due to the loss of novelty. The updates can only do so much. I wouldn’t recommend Pokémon Go to a friend mainly because I’m so frustrated with it.

I walked to the Riverfront Park after class by myself, to catch Pokémon along the river. One of my friends told me that when she played the app over the summer, she found aquatic Pokémon by water features. I spent about fifteen minutes trying to login to Pokémon Go. The app said that it didn’t recognize my account and requested that I try again or try a different account several times. I used more data than Wi-Fi as I played the game. For some reason, that works better. I successfully found a few Pokémon that I’d never seen before and captured them. I collected more Poke balls from the stops / landmarks than ever before and achieved level ten.

The article “Gamification and Post-Fordist Capitalism” presents gamification as a form of manipulation. It makes something mundane appealing and enjoyable. For instance, Pokémon Go makes exercise like walking a fun, diverting experience. In this case, walking is gamified and encouraged through the phone app. This is both positive and negative. I’ve seen videos where Pokémon Go helped little kids at the hospital be active and have fun. I’ve also heard stories about people almost getting hit by a car because they were playing the game and not paying attention to their surroundings.

I noticed that when the app boots up, the reminder to be alert at all times appears first before the game begins. I usually heeded that warning. When I played the game at the park, I was walking in the middle of a paved footpath when I looked up to see a bright light. In a couple seconds I observed that the light was coming from a bicyclist’s helmet. I got a gruff and loud “right in front of you” before I quickly moved to the side. This app can definitely be a dangerous distraction, especially if the player isn’t paying enough attention to the world outside of the game.
 

I played Pokémon Go between classes on campus and paused at several stops to collect more of those balls for catching Pokémon. I noticed that if you click on the stop and an image doesn’t surface, you generally won’t be able to collect any items. Sometimes you have to wait for the image to appear before swiping the phone screen and then tapping the bubbles of berries or potions. I’m not sure what the potions are for.

While I walked from class to my apartment, I was transporting a box on my scooter and playing the game at the same time. It didn’t really work, I couldn’t catch Pokémon and walk with the scooter at the same time. I had to stop every so often to catch one of the creatures or go out of my way to reach a Pokémon stop. In order to play Pokémon Go effectively, it seems like you need to go out with that as your only activity while walking.

Under the lens of aesthetics from the article “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research,” this game has a fantasy and a competition component. The player engages with creatures that don’t exist and eventually fight other players in the gyms. I personally found this game interesting because of the diverse, changing amount of Pokémon. I noticed that whenever I consecutively stopped at a Pokémon stop or captured my first creature of the day, the app would tell me that I was continuing a four-day (or more) streak. I think the app could improve by including some sort of reward after a certain amount of streaks. The player could receive a bunch of golden coins (I don’t know how to collect those, perhaps they need to be purchased) and that would make the game more fun. Pokémon Go would be a lot more fun if the crashing issues could be fixed since they affect the accessibility as well as the mechanics of the game. They deter me from trying to play Pokémon Go more often.
 

So far, I’ve encountered some sort of issue every time I’ve tried to play Pokémon Go outside of the apartment. Usually the app crashes or refuses to function after I open it or it refuses to work at all. I walked not too far from where I live today while trying to access the app when it started drizzling. After I opened the app, it reported that there was not enough data on the server and I needed to log in to my account. After the first time I tried logging in, the app claimed that it didn’t recognize the account even though it worked a couple hours before. I’m getting more and more peeved at Pokémon Go and the complications that arise when I try to play it. Either there’s no internet connection, no GPS signal, not enough data from the server, or I have to log back into my account. Whenever I try logging back into Pokémon Go, the app tells me that I need to retry. I complained about the game to one of my friends, and she said that the crashing is why she stopped playing it.

I recall that this game was overwhelmingly popular during the summer even though the app crashed a lot in the U.S. because so many people were playing it at the same time. It’s not as widely used now, probably because of the fact that it continues to malfunction so much and due to the cold weather (on the west coast of the U.S, anyway).

Pokémon Go has an interesting amalgamation between diegetic and nondiegetic action. The player engages with creatures on the app, which holds a digital space that incorporates the player’s surroundings. There’s diegetic action in the music and the sounds that plays while interacting with Pokémon. Would actions that happen outside of the app while playing it be considered non-diegetic, like a person crossing the street behind one of the Pokémon? It seems like Pokémon Go merges the virtual world with the outside world that we understand as reality. I suppose this combination is in fact part of diegetic action since the experience lies in the app.
 

I played the Pokémon Go app on my phone throughout the day and came to the conclusion that I have the best luck in my apartment, which is right next to a gym at a cafe. Every so often I can open up the app in my bedroom and see if there are any new Pokémon around. One or two usually pop up. I’m not sure what the benefits are of catching multiple duplicates of the same Pokémon so I’ve just been focusing on catching new ones. I tried playing the game to and from a restaurant later with my friend in the evening when it snowed. It was so cold I had trouble flicking Pokémon balls on the wet screen.

I noticed that Pokémon Go doesn’t have any narratives. There’s no emergent narrative or otherwise surrounding the avatar / the Pokémon. I didn’t spend my childhood collecting Pokémon cards or playing a Nintendo so I might be unaware of the stories that may surround the different creatures. I’ve seen people cosplay as the male avatar character with the red Pokémon balls and I knew what Pikachu looked like before I started playing the game. I get the feeling like I’m missing out something.

Pokémon Go seems to function as a simulation without any narratives. The objective of the game is to catch Pokémon anywhere outside through an accessible app. There are set conditions and an education of rules in the beginning through text and the image of a character. After that, the player is free to wander around with or without interacting with the creatures that pop up. The slogan “gotta catch ‘em all” promotes a specific behavior, which the chapter “Simulation versus Narrative” by Gonzalo Frasca mentions as part of what simulation incorporates (237). Including an emergent narrative or an embedded narrative would potentially hinder the game’s success in addition to its internal issues (which I will elaborate on in the next blog).