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subject matter interact within such settings: “if fantasy is a key element of games, we argue that educators can benefit by leveraging what is fantastical about particular academic domains (such as history or science)” (p. 292). In our work, we are inter- ested in how fantasy and AR emerge in user experiences of the game Pokémon Go.
Even given the recency of Pokémon Go, there has been some research related to the experience of playing (Kari, 2016; Paavilainen et al., 2017) including a concep- tual, phenomenological piece by Liberati (2017) that analyzes the experience philo- sophically. Game transfer phenomena (or GTP), a curious effect in which players experience “nonvolitional phenomena such as altered perceptions, automatic mental processes, and involuntary behaviors” (Ortiz de Gortari & Griffiths, 2015, p. 195), has been studied in relation to location-based augmented reality. Ortiz de Gortari (2017) found, among other results, that Pokémon Go players’ immersion connected to the experience of GTP. It was also found that:
Playing PoGo with sound was weakly positively correlated with forgetting what is happen- ing around oneself while playing, losing track of time, looking for a Pokémon outside the screen and having the sensation that a Pokémon is physically present.
Using the AR function was only correlated with forgetting what is happening while playing and as expected it was correlated with looking for a Pokémon outside the screen, but surprisingly it was not correlated with having the sensation that a Pokémon was physi- cally present. (p. 394)
Oleksy and Wnuk (2017) investigated aspects of player and place in location- based augmented reality games with a specific focus on Pokémon Go, concluding that “AR applications have the potential to ‘gamify’ the reality around us, which can alter attitudes towards places of playing. Simply put, it is not important where you play; rather, the place of playing becomes important to you” (p. 7). Together, the work of Ortiz de Gortari (2017) and Oleksy and Wnuk (2017) seem to suggest that immersion and connections to place may be a part of the Pokémon Go experience for some players. Finally, Rauschnabel, Rossmann, and tom Dieck (2017) “used the example Pokémon Go as a study context” for their theoretical investigations of AR games, finding that aspects such as enjoyment, nostalgia, and physical activity
“drive users’ attitudes toward playing Pokémon Go” (pp. 281–283).
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expanded to a television show, a panoply of merch, and even theatrical releases. The
“main” Pokémon video games adhere to a strict formula and camera perspective, a top-down look at your trainer as they roam the earth (known as “The Pokémon World,” as to avoid any confusion with our own planet), trying to battle and capture these “pocket monsters” in strategic battles based on a complicated rock-paper- scissors variant. The motto of Pokémon is “Gotta Catch ‘Em All,” and this prime directive guides everything in the franchise: the overall goal favors collector com- pletionism over outright victory (Bainbridge, 2014a). The Pokémon Trainer works toward the Sisyphean task of completing a Pokédex, a digital compendium of all the Pokémon they’ve collected—and those yet to be collected. Pokémon are gathered using spherical mechanical traps called Pokéballs, which, when successful, place them in some sort of suspended animation, where they can be used to fight along- side the player.
This gameplay loop is the core of most Pokémon games, with a few notable exceptions, like Pokémon Snap, released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. Pokémon Snap featured a photography mechanic: instead of capturing Pokémon physically, you explored the Pokémon World and captured them in various poses with your camera. Interestingly, Pokémon Go brought back the camera to the franchise, mak- ing Pokémon Go photography something of a social media cottage industry (Andronico, 2016). There seems to be a perpetual desire among players to capture Pokémon set against the world, real and imaginary, with photos or Pokéball. Even Pokémon Go developer Niantic Labs holds photo contests wherein Pokémon Go players use the AR features to place Pokémon in humorous or interesting settings and then snap their pictures (Pokémon Go Live, 2017).
It is important to note the potency of the Pokémon mythos, specifically among children and young adults (Allison, 2006; Patten, 2004; Walker, 2016). Even after stripping away the popular transmedia elements of the franchise—the movies, books, card games, video games, and toys—the core Pokémon Trainer experience presents an intoxicating version of childhood independence. In this alternative world, children—as young as 10-years-old!—are sent out to train and catch charm- ing Pokémon to serve as pets, companions, and warriors (Allison, 2006; Bainbridge, 2014a; Patten, 2004). This freedom from school, work, and most of the bounds of society permeates the Pokémon franchise, and the video games, including Pokémon Go, have always retained this level of freedom: go anywhere; catch Pokémon;
defeat others; rinse and repeat.
Many who have studied and theorized about play recognize that the imaginary and fantastical are salient elements of the phenomenon. The noted play theorist Sutton-Smith (2009) presented seven core rhetorics of play that inform our under- standing of the phenomenon, seeking to discern why humans—and animals—play:
progress; fate; power; identity; imaginary; self; and frivolity. While most of these rhetorics might apply to the Pokémon Go experience, two of the rhetorics of play speak to the fantastical and imaginary elements, those represented by the Pokélayer of game content: the identity and the imaginary.
9 Accessing the Pokélayer: Augmented Reality and Fantastical Play in Pokémon Go
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The rhetoric of play as the imaginary—play as a realm of the imaginative and creative—is a common theme in theories of play. Rieber (1996), pivoting off the work of Sutton-Smith and his seven rhetorics, argues that play remains separate from other activities because of its make-believe and imaginary nature. Caillois spoke of mimesis or mimicry play, the play of acting like someone else, someone imagined in real life, such as play-acting and role-playing (Caillois, 1961; Henricks, 2010). The Pokélayer AR overlay facilitates this mimesis, this fantasy of being a Pokémon Trainer, tasking the player with roaming the world to capture, just like a Pokémon Trainer in the titular franchise. As some participants discuss below, the AR and GPS features of Pokémon Go were essential to the effective layering of the game onto the “real world,” allowing them to live out fantasies of being Pokémon Trainers. This game layer—this “Pokélayer” as we call it—allowed for fantastical play for many of the participants in this research and was a driving force in their motivation to play the game. As Csikszentmihalyi (1975) proposes, play has the potential to be self-motivating, allowing for the player to forget personal problems, feel greater control of their environment, and embrace new identities, perhaps that of being a Pokémon Trainer. For Sutton-Smith (2009), the rhetoric of identity means more than just self-identity: it means constructing a social identity with others in a community, often through things like festivals and celebrations. Play gives you a fantastical identity, but it has to be held against the real world to see it (Sutton- Smith, 2009).
This points toward the social phenomenon of Pokémon Go. Even though the Pokémon Go phenomenon was rooted in the social experience of playing near and with other players, the game itself was designed as a solitary one, much like its forebears in the Pokémon lore: of children and young adults, exploring the world as Pokémon Trainers, capturing and training Pokémon for companionship, collection, and sport (Allison, 2006; Bainbridge, 2014b, 2014a; Patten, 2004). However, as noted above, the Pokémon Go phenomenon was a social one with players recogniz- ing each other on the street and forming ad hoc communities on social media. To play Pokémon Go among others, particularly at the game’s peak popularity, meant playing with other players. Players joined in the play, exploring the world around and with other players, rarely in direct competition, facilitated by the AR Pokélayer that the app creates. This ended up resembling something like Huizinga’s (2014) notion of the magic circle, making the world a “consecrated spot” or playground with special rules, “a temporary [world] within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (p.10). In a sense, the world became a “possibility space,” a game and play space where players are free to push against and explore the boundaries of both the game and real worlds (Bogost, 2008; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). For Henricks (2014, 2015), this kind of social play among other strangers, as will be discussed in the data, was an example of communitas, the feeling of being swept up into a movement larger than oneself. In Pokémon Go, the AR Pokélayer allows players this communitas and their individual and social identities as fellow Pokémon Trainers exploring the possibility space together.
L. J. Jensen et al.
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