In the Footsteps of Smartphone-Users Traces of a Deferred Community in Ingress and Pokémon Go

Abstract

In this article, the authors carry out conceptual and theoretical reflections on smartphone communities by closely investigating two apps: Ingress (Niantic 2012) and Pokemon Go (Niantic 2016). While the games’ narratives fabricate reasons for the players to move, it is the Smartphone - understood as an open object between technological and cultural processes - that visualizes and tracks players’ movements and that situates and reshapes the devices, the users and their surroundings. A central aspect is that the ‘augmented’ cities that become visible in the apps are based on the traces of others: other processes and technologies, as well as other players. These traces of practices and movements structure the users’ experience and shape spaces. Traces are necessarily subsequent and we therefore develop the concept of a deferred (smartphone) community and analyse its visibility within the apps. By close reading the two case studies, we examine potential “smartphone communities” in their temporal dimensions, as well as their demands and promises of participation. In order to gain a perspective that is neither adverse to new media nor celebratory of assumed participatory community phenomena, the article aims to interrogate the examples regarding their potential for individuation/ dividuation and community building/dissolution. In doing so, the games’ conditions and the impositions placed on the players are central and include notions of consent and dissent. Drawing upon approaches from community philosophy and media theory, we concentrate on the visible aspects smartphone-interfaces. The traces left by the various processes that were at work become momentarily actualized on the display, where they manifest not as a fixed community, but as a sense of communality.

The territoriality of teams: Assembling power through the playing of Pokémon Go

“…Pokémon Go is played through both digital and physical spaces, with the game interface providing a map of a player’s locality and an indication of where Pokémon can be found. Ganzert et al (2017, p. 44) explain in more detail how players are supposed to take on the role of a Pokémon Trainer and roam their personal local space to find and catch Pokémon. .…”

Experiencing the unfamiliar through mobile gameplay: Pokémon go as augmented tourism

“…This parallelism is important, as it highlights the transformative potential that the playing of Pokémon Go can provide. As an augmented reality mobile game, the guiding logic of Pokémon Go is to “catch them all” (i.e., to catch and collect Pokémon), meaning “players must move through their neighbourhoods and cities, different landscapes or countries and look for Pokémon on their map, which appear when a player is close enough to them” (Ganzert et al, 2017, p. 44). The mobile interface of Pokémon Go provides a map of the surrounding area, an incentive to navigate towards certain places and, in addition, a sense of familiarity that is overlaid upon potentially unfamiliar physical environments.…”

“…While the mobile phone is the physical interface through which Pokémon Go is played, the augmented map is the digital interface 2 . The map, therefore, is an integral part of the game; it is the “guiding device that lead[s] players to Pokéstops and portals” (Ganzert et al., 2017, p. 52), and integrates the player, the game, and the environment in which it is played. In itself, this reveals the extent to which the interface of Pokémon Go is a “relational system composed of multiple parts, each of which communicate with one another and the user to create a range of affective, habitual and often un‐reflected upon responses” (Ash et al., 2017, p. 167).…”

“…Through the unifying logics of play, Pokémon Go can shape the ways in which people engage with the world around them. The map provides a common navigational aid that both tourists and locals use to play the game and navigate around the city, meaning players are “incapable of not following the inevitably existent tracks of their precursory co‐players” (Ganzert et al., 2017, p. 51). As the game establishes certain routes around the city, so too does it bring players into contact with each other.…”

Gamifying place, reimagining publicness: the heterotopic inscriptions of Pokémon Go

“…Through the digital interface of the game, Pokémon – and a host of other game features, such as gyms and Pokéstops – are embedded within the physical landscape. The logics of the game compel players to ‘catch them all’, and to do so players must ‘move through physical space as they tag, collect, trade, and battle for digital artefacts and player achievements’ (Hjorth and Richardson, 2017: 4; see also Ganzert et al, 2017). As much as it encourages mobility through physical space, so too does it encourage players to engage with it, as the ‘digital artefacts’ of the game are anchored in place.…”