Pokémon Gone

John V Willshire

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I posted some writing yesterday about Pokémon Go, a fun throwaway remark in a book chapter I’m writing for Riccardo Torta & Beatrice Villari.

Excerpt from a book chapter: Comparatively small, fast business cultures could have an outsized effect on the slow layers of the built environment, e.g. Amazon affecting every shop on every high street at a fraction of the staff and premises costs, or WhatsApp eroding the value of the messaging market from inside the telecoms infrastructure that mobile phone providers installed and maintained. Meanwhile, disproportionately large cultural forces could affect very precise locations, e.g. the power of Google reviews in transforming the fortunes of a seaside fish and chip shop, or the endless question of whether you can charge the thirty-year old media powerhouse rent for the rare digital Pokémon it just parked on your lawn for the afternoon.

Little did I know that the news was emerging that Niantic Spatial had announced a partnership with Coco Robotics to use build an accurate (ahem) model of cities around the world that their home delivery robots would have to navigate.

The Coco 2 robot does have Pokémon vibes to it, I guess.

Picture – Semafor Article

Niantic Spatial don’t even own or run Pokémon Go anymore – but they did keep all the data that was submitted by users…

“Data collected by players of Pokémon Go and its predecessor, Ingress, is now being used to build an accurate model of the cities that Coco has to navigate. With Niantic’s VPS system, Pokémon Go can determine a player’s location in the world from their surroundings rather than relying on a player’s GPS location.” – Polygon

Anyway, I have history with Pokémon Go.

I used it as a city research tool back in the summer of 2016 when it launched (and became massive), because it landed a (then) 25 year old cultural leviathan into the parks, streets, bars and gardens of unsuspecting cities all over the world.

I even recorded screenshots of myself playing with the technology in different places in order to see what it told me about the technology and data underneath.

By 2018, the craze had certainly passed, but it was still an active thing for small groups of people – I used to use this image to describe the persistence of the game when most people had forgotten about it.

Pokemon Go players with the phrase "the past is still here, it's just not very evenly distributed"
With apologies to William Gibson

I’d be really interested, in the light of this ageing data set, just how accurate some dating imagery might be to navigate more obscure street corners in cities around the world. Or perhaps part of the deal could be to use the delivery robots to update the dataset when the older visuals don’t match the reality they meet.