The gameplay itself is friendly, and I think conducive to positive social interaction. It’s not a game about beating somebody up. The design of the product itself is deliberate in that sense. We try to convey that to our users in every way that we can.
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In terms of our responsibility there, we have guidelines for our players about how to play, about being respectful of the law and of people’s private property and being nice to other users. Adding a gamified element to it and a social element, I would agree with you it’s new territory, and people are figuring it out. I think that’s gone hand-in-glove with people going out and doing more of those activities. We all have apps that we use to track our runs, to count our steps, to time our bike rides. To me, it’s an outgrowth of things that have been around for a few years. I do think people are figuring out the social mores of how to act and what it means. What do you think about the way this has people behaving in unique ways and on large scales, converging on not just public spaces, but other people’s homes? Do publishers of virtual worlds have new responsibilities when the lines between imaginary and real worlds overlap like this? Which is people wanting things they can do together socially, to give people an excuse to get out and socialize with other people, which at the end of the day makes us feel good.
So I’m not sure Pokémon Go is something new, so much as a new take on something that’s been around for a long time. I think it’s really awesome that digital technology has evolved to the point that now we can use it, because it’s mobile, and we can build applications like Pokémon Go that can go and fill some of that void, some of these spaces that have been evacuated. It’s true, people spend more time indoors, they tend to know their neighbors less, some of those traditional activities have been supplanted by talking to people on Facebook or email, playing video games and watching movies on our big screen TVs. I think a lot of those have atrophied in the digital era. There are all these real world organizations that existed as things people could do together in the community outside of the house. There were bowling clubs, there were softball leagues, there were Lions Clubs. I think there have always been things that people have done socially together.
What do you think about augmented reality having this much impact on real world behavior? You’re out having dinner, having drinks or whatever, and it just feeds and makes our lives better, rather than something that takes us out of that completely.
It just blends in with real life, which makes it infinitely more interesting to me than something that’s occurring only in this virtual space. So instead of getting together with a bunch of avatars in a virtual guild hall, you’re getting together with your friends, meeting and going out together, or meeting up with them some place in the city. We saw it in Ingress and we’re seeing it in Pokémon Go, it’s just in the real world. That social organization is exactly the same dynamic here. So there were guild halls you could go to, and if you knew the secret way, you could get in and plan your next adventure with your buddies. That’s something we saw with Meridian 59, they spontaneously formed, and we ultimately built features within the product to support the guilds. And then the other key thing from MMOs was the social coordination, the social organization, which in MMO worlds are called guilds, of course. The challenge and competition of trying to outguess or outmaneuver a real person is infinitely interesting, and it doesn’t get old. One is that playing against other people is always more interesting than playing against a machine.
When Ingress was being conceived, I was thinking exactly about Meridian 59, with two main takeaways. Pokémon Go and Ingress, our other game, are both very much MMOs. I think the MMO world - which is itself an outgrowth of the roleplaying Dungeons & Dragons world - you can trace this all back to Gary Gygax and that strange, crazy game that people played with dice and paper back in the 1970s.
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