I used to love playing Pokemon GO, all while rollerblading across my town. It was a game that motivated me to explore the outdoors, and connect with others who played it. As an introverted highschooler, this went as to form friendships with individuals I would have never thought I’d speak to. Pokémon GO, developed by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, is a mobile AR game for iOS and Android. Its target audience are longtime Pokemon fans, mobile players, children with parental guidance, and adults who may enjoy the outdoors.
The gift system in the game is of pure design where it transforms geography into a form of social currency. Where a postcard, location, sticker, and sender are all part of this intricate design, forming bonds between players in a world virtual reality.
The system can at times feel like a maintenance of looping: open gifts, send, increase friendships level, repeat. The goal for many is to be able to exchange pokemons at a discounted stardust rate. In a way, the emotion of generosity seems to be central theme, but because this is a progression type of system, there are rules and incentives to it. Ultimately, minimizing the true aspect of friendship through a measure of consistency. If a player stops sending you a gift, then that “friendship” is likely over, goodbye shiny-rare legendary. Thus, Pokemon GO makes social connection feel warming at times (especially if you go out with actual friends) but also gamifies it into a repetitive loop of commodity.
To add onto this form of design for friendships, the note of “Your friend still has an unopened Gift from you” turns a supposed interaction into exchangeable monetary value (e.g. stardust discount to get a better pokemon). While it is a smart interface choice for design, giving players a reason to come back and actually check on relationships, it’s a low-pressure environment, where you could overlook the hearts, levels, and metrics, and simply ignore it all.
Thus, Pokemon GO makes social connection feel warming at times (especially if you go out with actual friends) but also gamifies it into a repetitive loop of commodity. Like all games, retention is important, thus if one truly cares about a certain person, perhaps buying special stickers and attaching them to your gifts can express this. This could become an addiction of wanting to retain certain people, especially those who’ve you’ve done raids with in-person, and thus could lead to an addiction in spending (theoretically).
The Latias raid screenshot shows the clearest pressure point for spending (I think I did spent money on raid passes for this…) The pressure of a countdown timer, a legendary Pokémon, and a large “Battle” button requiring a Remote Raid Pass, displays a sense of rarity, urgency, social participation, and most importantly, monetization for those that are remotely joining the battle.
This live service design strategy is meant to enchant players to buying passes. The whole design is meant to dull your logical side, lighting-up your emotions upon seeing the timer and legendary, and mostly likely leading to an urgent purchase, just to see if you can get a shiny legendary (which are more rare).
On the other hand, the raid system can create genuinely memorable experiences: I’ve oftentimes remember moments where hometown friends and I would battle together and thereafter go get dinner or play a board game.However, the same system can also push players towards a sense of control on possibly getting the legendary, if they spent. It could be argued that this can create a sense of addiction on spending, specifically for those that live in rural areas, and where there aren’t many legendaries/great pokemon. Thus remote is the only possible way to obtaining one. Compared to traditional Pokemon games on other platforms, where legendary encounters are usually placed inside a story/narrative, Pokemon GO often makes rarity dependent on time, location, and participation, and sometimes all of a sudden.
The cycle of addictions is further exacerbated by the illusion of control. Designers make it so there is a possibility that even if you throw all pokeballs at the pokemon, they can still run away, leading you to needing to raid once more. You quite literally feel you have control with each pokestrike, but at the same time, one can feel a sense of no control on the actual outcome. And in this case, because of this manufactured incalculability, you will spend more.
Moving onto the AR feautre, the image above captures the fantasy that made Pokemon GO become popular. Where the idea that Pokemon could appear in actual rooms, sidewalks, parks, and grandmas top roof is such a unique idea. Seeing Magikarp floating inside a room with no water is funny, and that adds some design charm to the game, in that players feel like actual poke masters. The game uses augmented reality as a way of changing how players interpret their surroundings, which I find to be fascinating, especially for those that enjoy fantasy.
On the other hand of design, the image also shows the limits of that illusion. Magikarp is not meaningfully interacting with the space. It is layered on top of the camera view. This can oftentimes create a connection of shallowness with the game experience because the room itself does not matter. Over the years the game evolved to make environments more meaningful by focusing on connecting certain Pokemon behaviors to specific physical locations, landmarks, and weather patterns, which is a great mechanic to the design as it does add to the adventure of fantasy and exploration.
This different edition of Pikachu shows the power of randomness (e.g. events that bring different versions of pokemon) The game’s Random Number Generation, allows for this possibility through probability and only during specific times. The player can increase their chances by playing more, checking more spawns, attending more events, and staying active during limited windows, but the final moment is still random with regard to placement.
In my view, this is one of the most important ways the game encourages spending through chance. The game often sells items that do not directly guarantee the rare outcome the player wants, but instead increase the number of chances the player gets. I spoke on this by providing the raid pass example, but an incubator gives another chance at hatching a rare Pokemon from an egg. Lures and incense create more encounters (can buy using money), which means more opportunities for rare or shiny spawns. These purchases are not compared to gambling because the player is buying into the possibility itself, but I believe it’s still an example of chance-based structure: where emotion based on the visual metrics can be dulled and lead to spending more to get that pokemon during events. Randomness creates surprise in the game, but in the game it can often feel repetitive in reaction, where near misses of obtaining the pokemon you want can lead to regret, purchasing more items to increase chances, then trying again, hoping things might be different. This sense of RNG with regard to specific pokemon appearing is best seen in shiny legendaries.
The search term “Shiny” organizes the Pokemon box around rarity, demonstrating luck, time, persistence, and tying back to that cycle of near missing and purchasing. What’s interesting about this design is that shiny Pokemon usually do not change the core mechanics of play in a major way compared to non-shiny counterparts. Thus, it’s a design feature based on rarity, which is worsened (and could arguably lead to an ethical question on addiction) by the games categories of shiny, shadow, purified, lucky, event costume, etc.. Each category creates another reason to keep playing. Additionally, the game obfuscates information in ways that can encourage more spending. For example, stats on getting a shiny or rare pokemon, events happening are not published. Players may know that something is rare, but not always how unlikely it actually is. This form of vagueness, adds to that ethical question, where players may believe heir chances of getting something is higher and justify spending on another pass.
This differs from a purely skill-based game like Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, where if a player fails a difficult boss fight, they can often identify what went wrong and improve. Whereas, in Pokémon GO, failing to win that pokemon, provides no useful information towards progress. That repeated attempt structure paired with RNG allow for a cycle of spending and enchantment.
Ultimately, when it comes to chance, Pokemon GO does use it for things like events and placement of pokemon, specifically during raid battles (which makes sense to me); the problem is that it does too well in combing this chance with players’s want to belong, explore, and feel lucky with that shiny legendary, therefore creating a situation of pay-to-win with an intentional cycle of using RNG as its premise. When it comes to design, the AR aspect itself is neat, where seeing a Pokemon appear in your room makes you curious, receiving a postcard from another town makes you wonder about that player and location, and where joining a raid that you did not expect makes you emotionally excited like a true explorer. Again, tts weakest design moments come when those same desires are turned into monetization pressure that have been listed above. I think the aspect of making the world traversable through collectible pokemon transform our lives into the play itself, but this experience is shadowed by the monetary scheme. 👿
