Gripped by Pokémania
POKÉMON Go has not yet been released in South Africa but thousands of fans of the 1990s Gameboy game and cartoon and many of the country’s top IT experts are already hunting the streets for the digital pocket monsters.
Businesses from barber shops and gyms to coffee shops and fast food outlets countrywide and even Durban’s uShaka Marine World, are cashing in on the augmented reality (AR) phenomenon that has taken the world by storm, using the game to market their goods and services.
Pokémon Go was released in the US, Australia and New Zealand on July 6 and has attracted an estimated 10 million gamers, more than doubling the value of Japanese maker Nintendo’s shares and doubling it’s market capitalisation.
The game, created by Niantic – in which Nintendo and Pokémon Company have an undisclosed stake – is bigger than Twitter and described by international and local IT experts as the “biggest thing in the history of the internet”, and now available in more than 30 countries.
But headlines across the world have warned of the potential hazards of playing the game.
CNN reported that a group of teenagers was lured and held up by armed robbers in Missouri; a teenager stumbled on a dead body in rural Wyoming while out looking for Pokémon; and two men fell down a cliff in Encinitas, California, in the US.
In Canada two brothers engrossed in the game crossed the border into the US unawares and were arrested by the US Border Patrol in Montana and handed over to their mother, according The Toronto Star.
Pokémon Go is a free location-based AR mobile game that uses a phone’s GPS to superimpose virtual reality on to the real world, allowing users to see Pokémon flapping, floating or flying nearby on the device screen, as if in the real world. Gamers – called trainers – must catch Pokémon that lurk anywhere inside and outside, and the game has fans off the couch and out in the sunshine for the first time in the history of computer games.
Buildings, tourist attractions and other locations in the real world are assigned as locations for in-game places, like gyms or PokéStops, that dispense items like lures used to attract the monsters to a specific place for 30 minutes and the Poké balls needed to catch them.
It also has gamers exercising, as trainers must walk around 5km to “hatch” Pokémon eggs, and they can’t cheat by driving, unless travelling less than 20km/h. Trainers train their Pokémon and join either the red, blue or yellow team to fight against opposing Pokémon teams for control of the virtual gyms often located at mosques, temples, churches and other public places.
Brett Haggard, director of the country’s third largest online tech publication, htxt.africa, estimates around 80% of those he knows in the IT sector play Pokémon Go.
“No-one really knows and can put their finger on how big it is because officially the app is not available in South Africa.
“It is bigger than it should be if you look at the organised Pokéwalks that are popping up. Eight out of 10 people I know in this industry are playing and worldwide it is the biggest thing in the history of the internet.
“People are spending more time on Pokémon than on Twitter. There are about 10 million players worldwide,” Haggard said.
Haggard added that businesses like Beerhouse in Fourways, Johannesburg, which is located near a PokéStop, were putting up lures for marketing purposes.
“We have seen brands dropping lures for people to congregate around the PokéStop and in the US there is a bar which drops a lure between 5pm and 6pm during happy hour,” he said.
“What’s scary is the number of people playing this game while driving and how many people have crashed into things. It puts your attention down on to the screen and blocks out the rest of the world,” he said.
Haggard cautioned potential gamers against downloading the app off sites that require users to click “allow installation of apps from unknown sources”, as this turns off the phone’s security settings, potentially exposing the device to dangerous malware that allows hackers to access address books, bank codes, the microphone and even to recall keystrokes and remotely control the device.
He advised that a safer way to download the game was to use a US, German or Australian sign in on the Apple App or Google Play store and an APN to appear as if you are in that country.
World Wide Worx managing director Arthur Goldstuck said the PokéStops and gyms had been extracted from the game Ingress, and were created at public spaces and landmarks such as street art and tourist attractions.
But while Boon Sheridan, who lives in an old church turned into a house in Holyoke, Massachusetts, has had a stream of trainers coming to battle at his home, which is marked as a gym, Goldstuck says regular homeowners won’t suddenly find their homes becoming PokéStops and gyms.
“You can apply to make your facility a PokéStop and that is what people are doing overseas and particularly in the UK, in order to attract people, because it becomes a very powerful marketing tool.” Goldstuck said most South Africans were downloading the game off www.apkmirror.com.
“It is called side-loading, when you download an app from a website instead of an app store.
“There’s nothing illegal about it and even the T’s and C’s don’t prohibit it.”
Goldstuck, who is also playing the game, said it was “astonishing” how big it had already become locally before the official launch.
He cautioned about the dangers but added that the media tended to be “technophobic” when reporting on technology.
“There are a lot of safety issues and children have to be made very aware of those issues. Children or adults shouldn’t walk around looking at their phone.
There are dangers for everyone if you are not playing it sensibly,” he said.
“Parents should manage their children’s screen time to minimise the extent to which they could become addicted to the game.”
He said the hype around the game was expected to “fall off a cliff ” in two months’ time when the Northern Hemisphere summer ends and everyone withdraws indoors.