facilities, the kind of space ideal for walking the dog – or letting the kids have a bit of well-supervised exercise.
On that evening, the draw for people crowding into Peg Paterson Park had nothing to do with reality. Instead, the virtual world of data and networks had exploded into the physical world of places and people, an eruption that began six days earlier, when a small games company named Niantic released a new smartphone app.
Niantic’s app used the smartphone’s camera and other sensors – including Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides accurate coordinates for any location on Earth’s surface – mixing all of this input together, adding to it, then displaying that synthesis to the smartphone’s screen. The world portrayed on-screen, though rendered in cartoon-like detail, looked similar to the real world, reduced to its essential figures and landmarks. Within this simplified landscape Niantic had situated synthetic, imaginary creatures – Pokémon.
Already 20 years old, the Pokémon franchise of card and video games, television series, films, books, and comics had revived the fortunes of the once-dominant/now-struggling video gaming firm Nintendo. The card games became a craze among 8- to 10-year-olds around the world, with sales reaching tens of billions of cards. A whole generation had played Pokémon, maintaining a nostalgic love for the imaginary (and cute) monsters.
Niantic’s app – Pokémon Go – came along at just the right moment to mine that nostalgia within a generation who had come of age in the era of the smartphone. Millennials with the latest iPhone and Android models found Pokémon Go drained their smartphone batteries like no app ever had – and turned the real world into the universe of Pokémon.
While the card and video games might allow players to imagine another universe where Pokémon freely wandered about, Pokémon Go united the real world – as sensed by smartphone camera and GPS – with all of the various Pokémon, each with their unique look, sound, and capabilities. Within its app, Niantic had lured Pokémon out of imagination and into reality.
Into that newly mixed-up world of real and imaginary, Niantic had added other features, including “Pokéstops” – landmarks keyed to real-world coordinates via GPS, and offering valuable items for the Pokémon Go player’s inventory – the sorts of tools that would make it easier to catch and train Pokémon.
Wanting to test its new app – and the huge network of cloud-based computers that supported it – Niantic released the app in stages, nation by nation, over a period of months. Australia, as a mid-sized nation with a high rate of smartphone ownership, got it first – and it quickly became a craze. As friend told friend, Australians began to play Pokémon Go in vast numbers. Groups of friends struck out together in search of Pokémon and Pokéstops. Hundreds of thousands of players went for a wander around their suburbs, looking for what they might find. For a few days it seemed as though “Gotta Catch ’Em All” had become the national slogan.
As a well-visited landmark in the suburb of Rhodes – mapped out by players of Niantic’s other app, Ingress – Peg Paterson Park had several Pokéstops. The first folks to stumble upon them told their friends, who told their friends, who told their friends – and those friends shared it on Facebook. All of which meant Peg Paterson Park – conveniently located just a 2-minute stroll from Rhodes’ railway station – got very popular, very fast.
Niantic added another clever feature to Pokémon Go – lures. Lay down a lure and the chances of attracting a rare and valuable Pokémon increased dramatically. But lures only worked for an hour before they vanished, and – unlike the app itself – lures cost money. Not a lot of money, though – just a dollar. The perfect reason to spend: Make a fun game even more fun.
Players soon learned that lures worked for everyone – not just the player who plumped for the lure. Everyone else around benefited. Drop a lure, and expect to see a few other Pokémon Go players turn up – lured in by that lure.
Players at Peg Paterson Park dropped lure after lure – drawing in many rare Pokémon.1 Players would message other friends – playing somewhere else – telling them to get over to Peg Paterson Park, because it had suddenly become easy to catch rare Pokémon. That combination of Pokéstops and lures, broadcast and amplified by social media, generated a vast crowd – hundreds of players all crowded into a tiny suburban park.
That might have been a matter of little consequence during daytime hours. But as it passed midnight (on a weeknight!), and the crowd showed no signs of dispersing, the police arrived – alerted by noise complaints from the apartment dwellers surrounding the Park,2 who couldn’t get to sleep over the hubbub of happy players. The police ticketed the double-parked cars and asked everyone else to move on – which, eventually, they did.
While players’ lures quickly vanished, those Pokéstops remained in Peg Paterson Park – drawing players back again, on successive nights.3 It never again reached the intensity of that Tuesday evening, but in the aftermath, it became apparent that Niantic had done something unexpectedly potent when it located those Pokéstops in the park, something that perhaps it had not even intended to do. Pokémon Go changed players’ relationship to space, and changed their behavior within it.
* * *
We’ve always imagined place: Here a church, there a graveyard, and over there, a school. Each place embodies its own associations, drawn from a mix of culture and memory. What we bring to our experience of place comes from both within and outside of us. While the contents of memory and our mix of emotions vary from moment to moment throughout our lifetimes, the cultural meaning of place tends to be far less mutable. A school means today what it meant yesterday, and will mean much the same tomorrow. Any change in the cultural significance of that place usually occurs so gradually we barely notice it.
While there may be times when a place becomes particularly associated with a cultural moment – such as the World Trade Center – these remain exceptions to a rule: The meaning culture ascribes to place tends to remain as it is. That “inertia,” its resistance to change, gives the world a solidity and validity that we rely on. We expect places to be today as they have been in the past.
When a place changes – perhaps a beloved tree has been cut down, or a building burns – we feel something like madness, as our external, collective, and cultural sense of place struggles to adapt to sudden change. Very little can play with our heads as profoundly as place. We take our behavioral cues from place: Sincere in church, somber in the graveyard, open and accepting in school. We “know our place.”
Changing place changes us.
With the exception of the theatrical machinery used to entertain and delight – changing place as a way to evoke strong emotions – the ideal of mutable place has always been something seen through the mind’s eye. We can imagine a place to be transformed, but in reality its inertia keeps it consistent. Or rather, had kept it consistent. For although the real will remain stubbornly stable into the foreseeable future, other forces are at work, changing our perception of place – and reality.
Over the last half century, computing has grown progressively more sensual, drawing closer and closer to our bodies. The earliest machines, though physically huge, lacked even the most rudimentary interfaces. Users of these computers “wrote” programs in wiring, physically altering these devices in order to modify their behavior.
The history of computing tells two stories: One, about how these devices became ever smaller and faster; another, about how they became ever more pliable, facile, and responsive. We found it too hard to conform to the ways of the computer, so we shaped these devices to conform to us.
We have computers that can
