Co-authored by Yousri MARZOUKI & Mark TURRELL
The inception of the new augmented reality location-based game “Pokémon Go” (PGo) has triggered a variety of behaviors and has drawn a significant amount of positive and negative reactions. This piece aims to examine the underpinnings of this sensational viral mobile application from different perspectives ranging from psychological to economic, and seeks to draft the lessons learned from such an unmatched tech-experience.
PGo has generated an aura of collective behaviors that reflect, according to many studies in both biological and social sciences, emergent properties of complex systems that are irreducible to meaningless individual behaviors within the network. Such complexity thrives at an exponential rate within the rise of social networking that created what was defined by some authors as a catalyst effect. The social scientist Duncan Watts mentioned the following about the importance of multiple-scale analysis of complex behaviors in an article published in 2007 in Nature: “Social phenomena involve the interactions of large (but still finite) numbers of heterogeneous entities, the behaviours of which unfold over time and manifest themselves on multiple scales.” These scales will be the subject of our analysis through many layers of the PGo phenomenon. The backbone of our integrative analysis is the saliency of a recurrent cross-over between our virtual world and our physical world. In this regard, it is customary when using other apps from different social media platforms to build a matrix of our social network and draw the social graph from it. The PGo mechanic and loop are very different as described by mathematician Matthew Lynley: “your in-game social graph is an extension of a supplemented version of your real-world social graph”.
A reversed collision effect
In 2011 Sid Mohasseb, the Chief Executive Officer of WiseWindow (a major provider of “big data” sentiment), introduced in a TED talk the idea of a collision between the physical and the virtual worlds. This collision results from the impact of online collective behavior and intelligence in our real life in driving actions. It can be considered as an epiphenomenon of the Virtual Collective Consciousness (VCC).
The following two examples from the past ten years can be considered as compelling cases to illustrate this idea:
The corrupted blood incident from the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game WoW (World of Warcraft) where a powerful spell called “corrupted blood’ was introduced for the first time in September 23, 2005. Given its short duration, infectiousness, and its highly lethal effect, game programmers thought that it will be rapidly contained through the game play. However the result was disastrous as the WoW universe witnessed a pandemic within a few hours of the release of the spell. The diversity of players’ reactions to the threat of infection are very similar to those observed in real life and the acceleration effect of the plague can only be explained by psychological fear more than anything else. This same event inspired scientists to build a mathematical model in order to predict bioterrorist threat if such events happen in real life.
Social networking platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. also known as social media) have enhanced citizen and consumer empowerment through today’s information technologies (IT). With respect to this idea, major social and political changes in the Internet era have largely benefited from online information sharing. An outstanding example witnessed at the sunset of this IT era is the very fast and sudden fall of long-lasting dictatorships in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, accomplished with a new breed of revolutionary arms: social media. The Tunisian and the Egyptian cases have enormously benefit from the impact of social networking in galvanizing revolutionary drive on a very large scale and at an unprecedented speed of spread. Facebook was the main catalyst in the Tunisian revolution. Likewise, Twitter played a similar role in the Egyptian revolution.
These examples have in common a trigger that started in a virtual digital world where users within the network will be involved in a sometimes long process of sharing similar thoughts and opinions until exhibiting collective efforts glued around one common goal.
With PGo, however, the effect is reversed in the sense that our real social network will impact our virtual social network through one artefact: the mobile app. Most important, is that all is kept in a loop that will ramp-up quickly as random gamers can be involved anytime in the process from either the real or the virtual network (see Fig 1).
Many features in PGo are not that innovative as many would think even for the so-called geocaching-like feature that becomes increasingly popular by the PGo; or the virtual augmented reality artifacts and experience that were introduced by Ingress, the precursor to PGo. Nonetheless, at a cognitive level, the game is rooted in previous knowledge and skills of the users which made it already a good candidate for a viral and addictive game. Despite its innovative and addictive aspects, this game sparked different reactions reflecting both fear and curiosity, opportunity seeking and misfortune of internet abuse as perceived by many users. Without pretending to be exhaustive, below we tried to list positive and negatives outcomes generated by PGo since the game started.
Positive outcomes:
PGo can be considered a Platform for commerce since it has the potential to lure and to attract people cheaply to specific locations - and more as one can imagine sponsored characters, etc - the example of McDonalds in Japan
The benefit of walking - weirdly people are now walking about… a goal that anti-obesity people have been aiming for for ages… and yet within a week there are car services designed for PGo, plus people who sell their accounts, or people who will go hunt on behalf of one or more customers (one can imagine a bagful of phones...) - e.g. Dubai players selling their accounts.
There is a nice sense of positional awareness - the geographic nature of PGo hunting means that tens or even thousands may converge on specific places at the same time. If one did not know PGo existed, as some drivers in NYC who are stuck watching hordes cross a street, then you would guess but not know there is a single purpose. Also, some ecological thinkers are excited about seeing more players visiting national parks as part of their real-virtual journey which will harness a great deal of ecological awareness in urban settings. Also interesting in relating the collective to the individual, each person is there are a single person for their own purpose, and just happen to be sharing their activity with others, a new mechanic to generate hyperconnectivity, to generate Virtual Collective Consciousness.
Negative outcomes:
Negative consequences - from being distracted (car crashes, etc), to invading private property, to luring people to mug them (in UK and Missouri)
Sadly, the first death caused directly by the game happened.
And the weird way that individuals experience a negative thing once in isolation… then it is shared in social media… then picked up from social media into the press (Buzzfeed, Business Insider types - would source stories from social contexts), and then with the mass media involved then it goes back into social at a much wider scale and speed. So bad people in the UK copy a method that was complained about two days before - was it a copy, or did different people came up with the same idea at the same time? This virtual collective now appears to be referenced from the social and mass-to-social domain, so that rather than there being an ‘idea floating in the ether’ people are copying behaviors
Lessons Learned
Over time one can imagine the game extending into more communal activities, or people create overlays to the game through apps or other services that allow such collective activity. There are Pokemon Chat programs for instance that help people connect and coordinate hunting activities.
One revolutionary aspect with PGo is that we can witness today a direct impact on our virtual connections with a source coming from our real social networks. PGo is a new reality bridge connecting two worlds through the game mechanic with a reversed loop. This provoked people’s curiosity that seem to be continuously intrigued about how this layer on top of real life works and how the game provides the players with a complete personal immersion into a real-scale environment. It takes players from virtual world setting to real-life setting.This reverse loop has captured the core functioning of our cognitive processing by building strong expectations into players’ minds beforehand and then by attracting them into the vibe with surprising outcomes. Nevertheless, the extra element to this is that the game used familiar characters, leveraging the experience that people had as ten year olds with PGo. New behaviors emerged as a result of the game immersion and unlike Facebook that creates a security bubble around users’ life, the privacy paradox can no longer hold inside platforms such as PGo because it is actually connecting complete strangers in real life. The first dating website for PGo players has been already created. Social connections can be made through all forms of domain, from connecting to parents at your child’s new school, to joining a new workplace. In the social domain we either are more protective of our social context (closed access to FB for many Germans), or are more open (connecting through Game center to total strangers at scale - many kids end up with friends from Clash of Clans - teaching social connections, somewhat anonymized, from a very young age).
The perceived social norms has been shown to play a significant role on users of social network sites, however PGo succeeded within few hours to make users adhere to the social group norm that significantly reduces the privacy paradox issue. Indeed, these games give us new social contexts that may or may not be connected to our physical or virtual worlds at the time, but users ultimately become addictive to them (and in some cases they can be so powerful and addictive experiences that they supplant them). It is not excluded that all these reasons had launched waves of ban of PGo from various venues including religious groups such as Shinto shrines in Japan, Saudi Arabia imams and Turkey’s imams union; along with Corporate groups such as Boeing who banned employees from using Pokémon Go at work.
To conclude, three main points can be highlighted through this analysis:
The reverse loop approach adopted by the PGo creators was revealed to be a “head-turner” even for hard-core video game players because it touches the basics of our human conation in terms of curiosity, tendency, striving and goal achievement.
The clear presence of a collective consciousness emulating a VCC form and vice versa. The collision effect of the game can be sensed through many examples cited above but also through data mining approach as illustrated by Fig. 2. Indeed, many keywords associated with PGo are anchored in real world such as: People, Catch, Reality, Pub, True, High School, etc.
The game is a promising tech-product because it can help developing different venues.
The bigger question might then be how long lasting it would be? It is not the first geolocation system, and maybe it was successful mostly because of brand recognition in its core audience. Doubts about the likeability of the game have already surfaced because of the game’s last upgrade, and there is a risk that future changes, such as removing aspects of geolocation, might upset a large portion of the user community. This in turn would harm the development and deepening of VCC formation (i.e. spontaneity, homogeneity and synchronicity) around the game. Or perhaps PGo shows that the mobile device is changing substantially the way we interact with each others and in the world. Maybe the real success of this game is psychological after all as it challenges our expectations and goes beyond what we think we know about what a phone and an app is capable of persuading us to do, still we can be surprised by innovative ways of connecting with each others. Ultimately, what some believed was the end of our genuine social ties with the inception of technology-supported social networking is, with the PGo, turning into strong evidence for the case of the new “homo socius”.
Authors:
Yousri Marzouki, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University where he teaches cognitive psychology and statistical modeling applied to behavioral sciences. After his post-doc training at Tufts University where he studied cognitive neuroscience of visual attention, he is currently conducting research at the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS, France) focusing on the relationship between emotion, attention and consciousness. Yousri can be followed on twitter (@YousriMarzouki)
Mark Turrell is a Professor of Global Strategy at Hult International Business School where he teaches persuasion, spread and scaling. He is the founder of consulting firm Orcasci and a new business social networking platform, Vork. Mark is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Technology Pioneer. Mark can be followed on twitter (@mark_turrell)