Opinion Go for it

What began as an April Fool’s Day collaboration with Google Maps has grown into the latest killer app, threatening to unseat Twitter as the most used internet service. Pokemon Go is a blindingly simple idea, using your smartphone’s GPS and clock to project collectible, trainable and fightable Pokemons onto the real world around you. Despite the craze it has generated, parts of the real world are not very excited about it. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Arlington National Cemetery have appealed to players not to catch or train Pokemon on the premises, for fear of disrespecting or disturbing the dead.

A game like Pokemon Go has been anticipated. The paintball craze had suggested that games played on real landscapes were the future. A decade before that, Tamagotchi mania showed that humans were suckers for cute, digital life forms. The lines of thought from which those two games were born converge in augmented reality. While the internet industry is all excited about virtual reality, which immerses people in a virtual world, the next big thing is augmented reality, which projects virtual reality onto real landscapes. It’s just easier to do.

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Pokemon is encouraging people to go where no gamer has gone before. Remember the arcade games where you used a physical gun to pop digital ducks? Now, imagine a shoot-’em-up in which virtual guns are used in a real landscape. This format is much more fun, and likely to create racier urban legends. Already, Pokemon has been credited with discovering corpses, being used by robbers to lure victims, and causing stabbings when players challenge people armed with weapons sharper than Pokemons. It isn’t the first augmented reality game, and the wave of Pokemania raging around the globe confirms that it won’t be the last. Augmented reality has stolen the thunder of virtual reality.