Pokémon Go and the need for a killer app
How Squirtles, Krabbys and Pikachus have breathed new life into augmented reality
My first was a Squirtle, quickly followed by a Shellder. My most recent acquisition, moments before typing up this column, was a Pidgeotto, nabbed while walking down a park path. If this is all gibberish, you clearly haven’t been sucked into the addictive gaming trend that is Pokémon Go. Not yet, anyway.
It’s a simple game, although it sounds insane in print. As you walk around in the real world, you cross paths with Pokémon – you may be familiar with the little yellow Pikachu. Spot one, and you can collect it, train it, and fight it against other characters down the local “gym” – Pokémon Go is essentially cartoon cockfighting.
While it’s surely the collectible aspect that’s triggering the addiction centres of our brains, it’s the “real-world” integration that makes Pokémon Go interesting: stumble upon a Krabby and it will show in augmented reality, the orange crab-beast overlaid onto whatever’s in front of you via the camera in your phone.
Sound dumb? It is. Yet millions of people are playing. In the first few days of its American release, 5% of Android users had downloaded and played it, making the cartoon-hunting app more popular than Tinder. People spend more time playing it than using Snapchat, Facebook or Twitter, Nintendo’s stocks soared. I, like thousands of others, installed it a week before it was made