Over the course of this weekend and today at work, I have been treated to many jokes and conversations and observations about the new exercise game Pokèmon Go.  Let me state at the outset that those people who would expect me to make fun of this particular game or its concept, or the sight of generally mature adults finding anime-based imaginary creatures in elevators or parks while engaged in exercise should know that I have no intention of mocking the game or the people who play it here.  There are matters that are worthy of ironic treatment, or times when I feel particularly ironic and witty, and admittedly neither of those apply here.  We live in a day and age where obesity is a massive crisis, and where moral suasion about sins of gluttony have not reached home, nor have efforts at promoting weight loss through public service announcements, years of painful experience dealing with frightening health problems like heart disease and diabetes or various chronic forms of arthritis among one’s friends and relatives or in one’s own life, nor have appeals for gym memberships.  It should come as little surprise in this context of consistent failure that we should find the appeal of gamification in an effort to make exercise fun.

In life it is often easy to know what we should and should not do, but harder to do what we should do and avoid what we should avoid.  This is a problem of such universality that all of us, in some way, can relate to it, even if we do not always admit it to ourselves or use that painful self-knowledge to build empathy and compassion for others who suffer from the problem in their own way.  We may know, for example, that southern fried chicken and sweet tea are not the best options for us, but when we cannot find the items we have bought for lunch in the midst of a fridge that is stuffed with leftovers and the raw materials of future family dinners, we may feel ourselves compelled to go and pick up exactly that for lunch.  And if that is true for me, it is clearly true for many other people as well.  But if there are areas where our self-control is relatively strong in the face of continual playing on our weaknesses and the inflaming of our longings, we tend to use these areas to distinguish ourselves from others.  In such an environment, we ought to celebrate those people who are able to turn something as useful as exercise into something that is a fun game that encourages our own desire to be a Pokèmon master in the real world.  So, since I have heard half a dozen people just today joke about trying to drive through places to gain experience on this game, and even ponder the possible distraction of the game that might lead to getting run over by traffic or trains.  Just after being released, the song is already provoking serious reflection about the effects of games and reality, even as it encourages people to exercise.

Gamification in life is not a new matter [1].  For years, long enough for me to have taken several classes on the subject matter, gamification has been a major aspect of business marketing.  Whether that means that games are full of achievements or whether even corporate webpages include badges that show how someone has completed certain desirable tasks, even to the point that websites promoting freelance writing have badges for writing articles on each day of the week and so on, gamification has found a place in contemporary culture.  Yet much of that gamification has not focused on fun or creativity.  A list of badges of transparently self-serving behavior is not exactly fun and exciting, and if one does not ultimately enjoy the tasks involved, or want to show oneself as having made certain achievements, the badges themselves will add little.  Yet Pokèmon Go, by mixing the obviously desirable aim of exercising more with something that is admittedly quite quirky, namely collecting imaginary creatures in the course of one’s existence as one walks or jogs around.  The increase in experience that one gains from exercise or from observation of the classic anime figures can be used to engage in competition with others if one reaches a certain level.  Even someone like myself, who is admittedly not the most fun person around, finds this to be quite intriguing and enjoyable, even with the concerns that exist.

What is it that makes the game so fun?  For one, the game itself takes advantage of an existing story and world that many people care about.  Admittedly, I am a bit too old to have been interested in the card game when it first came out during my teen years, but the game itself established a world that people care about and know well, and by turning our own world into that world, by showing us something odd and magical and hidden within our own world, it strikes a deep desire to enjoy seeing hidden layers of reality in our ordinary world.  Whether it is right that we ought to find this appealing is a different question, but it is certainly a common desire, and being someone who enjoys hidden layers of meaning and wonder in the otherwise mundane nature of reality, I feel it hypocritical to criticize others who do the same in different ways, even if I point out that those who seek the hidden layers of texts and contexts and those who walk around looking for Pokèmon while exercising are not so different after all, in that both operate with a working assumption that what we see around us can be full of all kinds of hidden and odd surprises that are not visible to everyone else, but that reveal to themselves who are properly equipped or prepared.

Regardless of how long the game is played or remembered, it likely that its massive success will be copied by others.  Some of those copies will likely copy the mechanics of Pokèmon Go without capturing its quirky magic.  Some will change genres and present a world that is distinct in some fashion from our own.  Some will change the desirable aim, perhaps, from exercise to something else.  Yet to the extent that any of those future games work, they will work because they present us with a world that we are interested in that is somehow hidden in our own world.  We have long played games that allowed us to imagine ourselves as parts of rich and complicated worlds that we wanted to spend time in.  If we are able to play games that turn our own world into something deeper and odder, we will have accomplished a task of virtual reality in taking people into realistic games that mimic reality, by turning reality into part of the game.  How many people saw that coming when we thought that virtual reality would end up being like Holodecks on Star Trek or ever more realistic video game platforms on larger screens?

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/challenge-accepted/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/we-are-all-made-of-stars/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/founding-members/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/data-humanism/