CATCH THEM IF YOU CAN
Chasing virtual Pokémon characters around has gripped the nation. Jody Scott probes our new obsession.
Chasing virtual Pokémon characters has gripped the nation.
It’s a cold, rainy Friday night and a mostly female crowd is converging on a street corner in a sketchy part of town. Of course, it’s not unusual to see women hunting in packs after dark. They’ve been doing it forever. But tonight, they’re not searching for Mr Right. Instead, they are desperately seeking an electric creature called Pikachu and his band of virtual friends, superimposed into real life on their smartphone screens.
On the surface, it seems so stupendously 21st century. But according to psychology professor Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England, playing augmented reality games such as Pokémon Go satisfies our primal urges to forage for new things. And these urges are as old as humankind.
“Finding things and the reward associated with finding them is an old evolutionary adaptation,” Professor Hills says. “Dopaminergic responses in the brain occur when we have sex, eat good food and when we find bargains in the supermarket.”
In other words, bargain hunting, trawling Net-a-Porter for the perfect summer sandals and playing Pokémon Go deliver the same neural rewards as eating sugar and having sex. “A long time ago, this happened when we located the tracks of our future dinner, bedded down with our spouse, or simply found a piece of sweet fruit,” Professor Hills explains. “If you’re a Pokémon Go player, you experience this when you find Pikachu, Onix or Mewtwo.”
This hard-wired human desire for dopamine (combined with curiosity) inspired more than 20 million people globally to download Pokémon Go since its release in July this year.
Within weeks of launching, it became the biggest game in history and the most viral application of all time as downloads outstripped Twitter and dating app Tinder. And according to technology website TechCrunch, it soon captured more screen time than Facebook, too.
But perhaps most surprising is that 63 per cent of Pokémon Go players are female, according to US-based mobile application
data service SurveyMonkey Intelligence, putting paid to the myth that video games are dominated by pimply teenage boys. Or that Pokémon Go is merely a nostalgia trip for millennials ( born between 1982 and the early 2000s) who grew up watching and collecting the cute anime following its launch in 1995.
Another explanation for the mass appeal, particularly among female players, is that it encourages social interaction. “In addition to foraging, social interaction is at the core of human evolutionary interests,” says Professor Hills. “It drives human actions from the way we interact with our families to the way we interact as nations. We do many things because other people do them, and we often do them because we get to do them with other people.”
He says these types of games are also perfectly paced to suit the human attention span. “When rewards come too slowly, we start looking elsewhere; when they come too fast, we saturate and stop feeling the reward … Gaming is a recipe of cultural cues, narratives and incentives, designed to engage the human mind.”
By luring us outside to catch ’em all, Pokémon Go has been credited with encouraging us to exercise, lose weight, appreciate nature, explore our cities, visit historical landmarks and socialise with strangers. Apparently, it’s even helping relieve depression and anxiety.
All this lavish praise echoes Pokémon Go creator and Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke’s lofty desire to build games that “deepen people’s involvement in their town or community, to encourage people to actually meet up in the real world”.
Of course, people who don’t play video games often claim they can make people isolated and antisocial or stifle empathy and even incite violence. Or that they are simply a massive waste of time.
Yet games can create strong emotional experiences and social connection just like films and novels do, says Professor Katherine Isbister, who is the author of How Games Move Us: Emotion By
Design and based at the University of C California Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media.
“Compelling games don’t happen by accident anymore than do gripping novels, movies or music,” Professor Isbister says. “Films and books are never lumped into one category, yet people talk about games as if they are all the same.”
Professor Isbister says games can also be an opportunity for self-examination. “Who do you choose to go out to play with? Do you need to catch everything, or are you a novelty seeker? How long do you choose to play and why? All these things can be fodder for self-reflection.”
She believes games can trigger deeper emotion than other media including films and novels because players can control how the story unfolds.
“Our feelings in everyday life and in games are tied to our goals, our decisions and their consequences,” she says, adding this is why psychology researchers use video games as research instruments to tightly control situations and demonstrate how particular challenges lead to emotional responses.
“To the human brain, playing a game is more like actually running a race than watching a film or reading a short story about a race,” she explains. “When I run, I make a series of choices about actions I will take that might affect whether I win. Emotions ebb and flow as I make these choices and see what happens as a result.”
Augmented experiences will soon become more intense thanks to a new generation of virtual reality (VR) headsets promising to improve upon the much-hyped but ultimately disappointing Google Glass. And the VR revolution is tipped to get even more people gaming, taking international video game sales already worth more than $ 70 billion annually to almost $100 billion by 2020.
Professor Isbister says the ability to physically insert yourself into the story makes it easy for video game players to enter a pleasurable optimal performance state that leading positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously called “flow”.
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi argued people are happiest when they are so completely absorbed in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.
“When people are in flow and when musicians play at their best, when athletes are in the zone and when programmers stay up all night creating brilliant code, time seems to melt away and peripheral problems disappear,” says Professor Isbister.
Yet not everyone is convinced that there are benefits to immersing ourselves in virtual or augmented reality. In an article for online journal Quartz, Canadian neuroscientist Colin Ellard argues whether walking while collecting creatures is psychologically healthy.
“In spite of some of the glowing accounts of the app’s ability to encourage “exploration”, we are not likely garnering the same emotional and physiological benefits as we would on a technology- less walk,” Ellard writes.
“Beyond the positive effects of exercise, there are many other benefits we gain from strolling through the streets – but we often can’t access them when we’re avidly chasing virtual creatures through a three-by-six-inch screen … Let’s not kid ourselves that Pokémon Go players are really learning very much about the world, enriching their minds or finding their place. For anyone wanting that kind of experience, the methodology is much simpler: go outside. Take a wander. Look around. Your brain will thank you for it, no phone required.”