Since its release on July 6, “Pokemon Go” has become a cultural phenomenon inspiring players of all ages and genders to walk around while staring at their smart phones and abruptly stopping to toss Pokeballs.
Approximately 30 students met for a campus “Pokemon Go” crawl outside of Talley Student Union on the evening of Wednesday, July 13. After seeing a similar event in Philadelphia, Ross Ledford, E-Sports Club president and senior studying materials science and engineering, was inspired to organize the event.
“When [‘Pokemon Go’] finally launched, I realized how amazing it was,” Ledford said. “It seemed like an unreal possibility, then it actually happened.”
The students traveled around in a large group, searching for different Pokemon and visiting points of interest on and around campus.
“I grew up playing Pokemon, always loved the game, and this is just kind of the next step,” said Danny Gerowitz, a graduate student studying physiology and poultry science who attended the event. “It takes it to a whole new level.”
The game was developed through a partnership between The Pokemon Company and Niantic, an augmented reality mobile game development studio that originally began as an internal startup at Google. Niantic, prior to developing “Pokemon Go,” was best known for developing “Ingress,” a science-fiction game with similar location-based mechanics.
To catch a Pokemon, players must swipe the red and white Pokeballs from the top of the screen in order to “toss” the balls at the Pokemon. The Pokemon are represented by detailed 3-D sprites that appear to be, thanks to smartphone’s cameras, in the real world. The player is instructed to try and “catch them all,” which for now means hunting down the 151 different Pokemon from the original games.
According to the Pokemon website, certain Pokemon only appear at certain locations, such as water-type Pokemon near bodies of water, so the game requires exploring real world areas using GPS data on a map. As players walk around, Pokemon will appear on their screen and the catching mini game is initiated. Every miss or failure to catch costs a Pokeball. To replenish Pokeballs, players must either purchase more Pokeballs through the in-game store or visit Pokestops.
A Pokestop is a location of interest that gives out free items to players including Pokeballs to catch Pokemon, potions to heal Pokemon, and Pokemon eggs. Pokestops can be a variety of locations including churches, schools, post offices and art installations.
NC State has several Pokestop locations, including the Talley Student Union Technology Tower, Bowen and Carroll Halls, Wolf Plaza and even the now-destroyed Harrelson Hall study lounge. These Pokestops are the main ways to obtain items and are marked on all players’ maps, leading to player interactions in the real world.
“I played [Pokemon] a lot when I was a little kid so there’s a lot of nostalgia,” said Jonathan Service, a senior studying biomedical engineering. “It’s cool to capture a bunch of them and then evolve them. There’s a feeling of achievement there. It forces you to explore a bit. In Durham, I found multiple parks that I didn’t even know existed, Pokestops and such.”
In the discourse about “Pokemon Go,” many have praised the game for increasing physical activity, improving mental health and increasing social interaction among gamers in the physical world, rather than just the virtual world.
However, others are somewhat skeptical. Assistant professor in communication at NC State, Nick Taylor, studies how video games affect our everyday lives, online and real communities, and how we think about gender and ethnicity.
“Of course people are going to meet up in ways they haven’t before and people are going to go to places they haven’t before,” Taylor said. “But, the first question is, who gets to do that and who doesn’t get to do that? Is it safe for instance for women to walk around certain areas at night and catch some Pokemon? Probably not. Is it safe for African-Americans to be skipping around people’s houses catching Pokemon? Probably not. I’m exaggerating here a little bit, but you’re catching my drift.”
Privacy is also a concern for Taylor, given Google’s intimate knowledge of vast amounts of our personal information.
“From a big data point of view, it’s just basically the best gimmick to get people to leave their GPS’s on all the time,” Taylor said. “Of course we know that when we leave our GPS on, someone somewhere — Apple, Google — are recording where we’re going, who we’re close by, what we’re visiting.”
TJ Kelly, a recent alumnus, studied with Taylor, particularly in the area of gender issues with video games.
“Gender is not really represented in the game very well,” Kelly said. “Making it very binary with either being a male or a female character was a little bit old-fashioned. But just dealing with a lot of women playing this game I think is a great component. I think this is something that really shows that Pokemon never was a guy’s game or a girl’s game, this was everyone’s game.”
A Raleigh-based meetup, organized through Facebook, is scheduled for Saturday, July 16. The event begins at noon and currently has more than 3,000 people marked as interested and 800 marked as going.
A group of students walk behind Riddick Hall looking for Pokemon during the “Pokemon Go” Campus Crawl on Wednesday, July 13. Around 30 people joined the meetup to capture Pokemon and travel to Pokestops on campus.
