Pokémon Go has suffused my life.
I'm the mother of two fairly young children,
11 and seven almost and they both took to
it so quickly.
And one of the features of any service or
game that swamps our minds is that feeling
that you've almost been waiting for it.
Sometimes I think about Geriatric 1929, an
early user of YouTube, who said when he first
saw YouTube he had been an RAF pilot.
He's a pensioner in England.
He had lived in a state of depression having
lost his wife remembering his heyday using
radar and sonar during the war.
And when YouTube first appeared it was like
where have you been all my life?
This is what I want to do.
I want to be able to communicate with huge
numbers of people through the ether.
That doesn't appeal to everyone, but it appealed
to many of us when we saw YouTube for the
first time.
The same thing happened with Pokémon Go.
You looked at it, and we've been on the brink
of playing with what augmented reality might
be for a long time looking at our phones,
looking at maps and juxtaposing that with
real life and toggling between an experience
of looking at screens and looking at real
life.
And sometimes one is more compelling and sometimes
the other is more compelling.
Pokémon Go in juxtaposing its little creatures
onto the world, it's almost as though, it
is as though we've been like almost training
for this in our dreams.
The onboarding for Pokémon Go is so simple.
There's so little to learn.
At the same time I was learning that I was
trying to play Magic the Gathering for the
card game and there was so much friction in
my learning it.
I knew that I would be part of a unique cadre
if I learned it, and it's very complicated
and esoteric, but I just kept getting thrown
off the experience.
Pokémon Go, like other great services on
the Internet, you're in before you know it
and you're in with a lot of people.
There's nothing elite about it.
And I'm not sure I think that it's a socials
good, it may be and you never know – when
I argue that the Internet is a work of art
I don't argue that it's like good for our
health, I don't argue if it's good for society,
good for one of the parties or another, good
for America, good for globalism, I argue that
it's art and art leads us to places, it changes
us and asks for a willingness to be changed.
And certainly kids and others that are venturing
out into the world sometimes at night in strange
parts - I was just in Massachusetts.
I saw a plaque I had never seen before, the
usual stories, but when people venture into
that wide boundaries outside the narrow confines
of where you're kept in a safe spot with other
apps, Angry Birds say, you are going to take
risks and art asks us to take risks, literally
asked to move us from one place to the other
exactly the way Pokémon Go has been moving
us all over the world wherever it's released
or wherever they're not trying to hack into
it, all over the world to new places.
And in that way I think it's a work of art.
Whether it's a net gain for civilization remains
to be seen.
