Design lessons from Pokemon Go

So my family are currently enjoying this game at the moment. And according to my Facebook feed the rest of Australia is too. I even heard an advisory from the Victorian Police on the radio expressing safety concerns over people playing the game while driving, crossing tram lines and so on.

So, what things can we draw from it? Here is a list I've gathered, in no particular order.

• Popular IP wins
• Bugs aren't that big a deal if your app is popular enough
• Players don't have to be constantly engaged, it's legit to have a game with nothing to do
• Even dodgy AR is cool
• Incorporating real social elements instead of social networks is great.
• There is a market for games that encourage walking and exercise

That's a bit of a brain dump, what do people think of the app?

 

Security is horrendous. It has interesting possibilities for meeting people and discovering hidden objects in the real world. It's only available in three English-speaking countries, so I dunno anymore than that.

 

1. Don't make games like Pokemon Go.

 

I forgot about the geo release. It's been pretty much dominant on social media here.

To bring others up to speed if you haven't played it yet:

The game is a casual Pokemon game, based entirely on geolocation services. Players use Pokeballs to catch Pokemon, who move about in the real world. Different world areas have different Pokemon, so a beach or river will have water types, suburbia has tonnes of rattata, pidgeys and so on.

Once a Pokemon is located the app opens up the users camera, and places the Pokemon on top of a real world feed. Thus you can catch a pidgey sitting on someone's shoulder, a rattata in the bathtub, a Machoke standing by the mailbox and so on.

The game also has PokeStops and Gyms, which are attatched to real world land marks. The cafe across the road is a PokeStop, as is the park my daughter plays at. The local shopping centre has a gym. And so on. At PokeStops players get free items, at Gyms they can battle other trainers Pokemon.

All of this has had some fascinating real world impacts. There are more people out in the streets and in the local parks. I've had several conversations with relative strangers asking if anyone has seen the evee I was tracking. Then there are cases where thousands of people turn up at a monument after rumours of a zaptos sighting.

And of course there are some darker real world implications too. People playing while driving. Lures being used to attract people for muggings.

Either way the game is having some significant levels of social impact here. It's ironic that the same IP that kept us inside as kids is now getting our children outside again.

 

Care to provide specific details you don't like?

 

What if you live in a small town or a rural area? What are the chances that you will be able to play?

This is big now among some of our homeschool kids (not mine but others), but some of them don't have access.

 

Not sure on this one. I'm curious to drive out to a small town now and investigate. I would imagine the pokemon distribution would be about the same, but access to gymns and PokeStops might be harder. Then again, if they distributed then roughly evenly by geography being in a small town might be an advantage.

 

The main lesson is that brand is also a social mechanics. first pokemon hit america in 1995, we are now 21 years after that, the diffusion of the brand is enough to spark conversation, the world is well known and not obscure, ie they are able to get reference immediately because of the brand, the game don't play on obscure reference at all so nobody is left. 10 years kid in the 90s are now 30s, brand still popular among kid 20 years after, now generations can talk about the same subjects, from 10 up to 40.

Other than that, it's a subgenre of arg, ingress was successful, we had these kind of game for a decade now. Brand is the main difference.

 

Some of our homeschool mom's play the game too so it isn't just kids. It sounds neat to me mostly because we do geocaching and it seems similar.

However, the driving while texting and talking is already so bad here and causes so many accidents. That worries me. It seems whenever I get behind a swaying, slow moving car on the interstate, it is always someone texting or sometimes even using a laptop...or an elderly person, lots of those in Florida. lol

I remember when a wobbly car almost always meant an intoxicated person. Now days it is often just a very foolish person.

 

Just let them, while staying at a safe distance. The problem solves itself

 

This is what makes the game a unique experience for me. The idea of actually meeting your allies and opponents face to face, along with the number of players that only an IP as large as Pokemon can bring in creates an experience that we really haven't seen before.

On the other hand, there are quite a few safety issues that the game has. Due to the game's nature of promoting travel, I've seen a ton of people this weekend driving and playing the game. Also, people are constantly looking at their phones while walking, which has some obvious consequences.

 

Yeah...but I have a son who drives and two teen daughters that will soon. It is the inexperienced drivers who are often victims of bad drivers.

 

I live in the countryside in the UK and i can tell you it's absolutely terrible. You have to walk for 10 minutes to find the nearest pokemon to catch and there's only one of those "pokestop" things walking distance from where i live, and i have no idea where i'd have to go to find the nearest gym. I've heard that they're using some sort of population density map of some sort to balance the spawn rates, but honestly it's not worth even playing the game unless you live near enough to a town or city to have a high enough spawn rate to play it.

 

Seems like the game needs to scale relative to town size and population.

 

Eh, far too hot to do that here this time of year. Not tempted. Maybe in the winter.

 

Part of the problem with the distances as well is that it looks like they simply copied over their Ingress "portal" locations, which if IIRC, were largely out sourced to the players to submit back to Niantic to be turned into in game locations. So if your rural location didn't have a lot (or any) Ingress players, then its possible you'll be heavily lacking in the Pokestop department.

 

It's also possible the UK hasn't been properly set up, as the game hasn't officially launched there yet...

 

A friend texted this to me. I thought you guys might like it.

 

My Twitter & Facebook feeds have been full of Pokemon go. There was a large gathering in Sydney on the weekend that had about 1000 people meetup & schlepp around the city chasing Pokemon.

The funniest things are the errors that are popping up:
1) some guys house had been mis-tagged as a church on whatever the devs used to identify public spaces & he found out that in the game his house was a Pokemon gym so he had all these people around his yard looking for Pokemon at all hours.
2) in New Zealand a Hells Angels clubhouse/bar was labelled as a Pokemon gym so all these 'normal' people were walking in looking through their phones without paying attention to where they actually were & the potential danger they were in.

 

I can't speak for LaneFox, but the game has plenty of stuff to dislike. It is extremely buggy (battling a gym or catching a pokemon bugs out about 30% of the time for me), and has pretty awful combat and pokemon catching system. Using something similar to the combat system from regular pokemon games would have been way better, and I think it is simple enough for a mobile game. The game seems to want you to track down pokemon, but the whole 1, 2, or 3 footprint system for how far away they are is vague and inconsistent. Giving you actual distance in feet, or an arrow pointing in what direction it is in would be way better.

The whole "Pokemon in real life" concept is pretty hard to mess up, but in my opinion they messed it up. Just making it a regular pokemon game where you have to physically walk around and can see pokemon with AR, but is similar (with a few simplifications) in basically every other way would have been much better.

 

I live out in a forest, not in a town/city. It's pretty unplayable around these parts. Pokemon don't really show up as far as I can tell (I haven't tried very long), and there aren't PokeStops anywhere around here.

So I don't seem to have the opportunity to get into it.

 

Fo the game to be play all over the world they would need procedural generation

 

From what I gather most of the PokeStops were directly translated across from Ingress.. Ingress allowed players to tag locations that should be made into portals. Ingress players would upload photos of landmarks and the company/community would decide if the location should be considered significant. One of my friend's was an Ingress player, and several of the local PokeStops use photos he took for Ingress.

The game is also heavily supported by Google and all of the data available to Google Maps.

 

I know, but I doubt ingress player tagged the whole world, and pokemon has more penetration than ingress ... The problem is how are my chance to play the game in my locals? I'm not in the usa and I don't remember ingress being big here or whatever, I'm just a small island somewhere in the ocean.

 

Which island? Apparently NZ is doing fairly well. I would imagine every island with a decent population will have at least one PokeStop. And that's pretty much all you need to play.

 

Martinique! NZ is another league lol

 

Ah, I see. Still 300,000 is a respectable population. There are smaller population centres back home in NZ that still seem to have plenty of play potential.

 

Interesting read about ways for local businesses to make money from people playing Pokemon go. The interesting bit is how Pokemon monetise that as well, by people buying lures for about $1.20/hour that attract Pokemon & therefore players. I'm not sure how long this will last if there is no cap on how long lures can be used in one place, or if multiple shops in one small area can all use them at once.

http://www.inc.com/walter-chen/pok-...sales-at-small-local-businesses-here-s-h.html

 

An article my wife sent earlier today about how it relies upon the standard addiction hooks and cycles (probably sent to her by one of her co-workers, he has some sort of psych PhD and is a mobile game dev -- he's actually been hired to make at least one AAA game more addictive -- I won't name names, but I'll just say there's a pretty good chance you've played it).

https://medium.com/@chrisnheu/what-makes-pokémongo-so-addictive-a6a841bb5286

 

Frankly this game makes me feel like taking a one way trip back to the 1980s or something. I always like to think that games, even while using addictive/SkinnerBox elements, can still provide something to the player that is constructive in a personal growth kind of way, whether that's a little bit of primitive self-confidence, inspiration through art, stress-relief through simple fun, or whatever. However this game comes across to me like an infection of your world-view where your reality is modified into the endless pursuit of a nonexisted 'material' wealth. At least money actually exists.

And before anyone says the usual bs about games bringing people together, so does drugs, alcohol, gambling and promiscuous sex. The question is not whether it brings people together, but on what basis.

OK since this is about the design side, as others have described, it seems to use the usual addictive pair of hoarding 'colorful stuff' mixed with competition, the latter providing a good reason to never pay much attention to the actual value of what you're hoarding. It's the usual mobile thing like candy crush that directly takes advantage of impulsive elements of the human character. There's also a primitive social network built into it so that when you feel too ridiculous you can find other ridiculous people to commiserate with, and even meet up with them! Just like a virtual casino that exists anywhere you are!

Hope it didn't come off too negative, I'm not a hater as such of smartly designed games that take advantage of human psychology, in fact that's the key for any sort of communication. But I simply find the game not only depressingly content free but also becoming closer to modifying public aspects of social life in a way that I can't help but despise.

Ah well, that's life I guess. If there's something better than Pokemon Go to spend your time on, I guess it has to stand on its own merits after all.

 

Now the real question is what the game's shelf-life is going to be. To me it looks like a flash in the pan, but it's a Gen-X slot machine: I missed whatever attracts people to Pokemon by several years, so my perspective may not be relevant.

 

thats a great game.
i like its. But not open my country.
________________________________
Kaos Murah Kaos Distro Desain Kaos

 

It would just kill your productivity. Kinda like these forums.

 

The fun part I don't see discussed is the concept of "transactional objects"!

Back in 2004 I designed a game inspired by tamagotchi and the sims, based on appointment mechanics (like farmville before it exist, basically tamagotchi and pet games) and geolocalisation, it was called friendly planet. Mobile phone was still tied to carrier, iphone was not a thing yet, I'm not sure facebook was big yet. You were basically managing the achievement of a little character living in an alternate reality superposed to ours, the phone was a way to see through their world. The main idea is that you couldn't progress quickly without the help of other people who had to specialized, which would encourage sharing. Since I came to the conclusion that reality had poor and dangerous level design, I use "repetitions" to help, basically place where divided by type, you only had to go to a type to get a chance to have an events. Progressing through various metric gave you different events building your own stories.

The main observation was that mobile had become transactional objects, ie mediator between people. I think everyone had this experience to be alone in a crowd or a mob, you don't know anyone and you don't know what common ground you had, very often smoking break, cigarette (I don't smoke) was a way to break the ice around a common subject and activity: smoking! Mobile phone where somewhat doing the same at a smaller scale. My goal was to make a game that will take advantage of mobile to replicate the smoking break bonding experience. Of course in 2004 the video game culture was still heavily very hardcore oriented, it was only the beginning of casual flash game with the advent of their first success icons: diner dash. I was laugh to oblivion and couldn't execute that vision.

The thing I'm seeing now, beyond hook cycle and other gamification hype, is that the belonging and watercooler design are overlooked in analysis of successful design. That's kinda sad, bringing people together is something to be exciting, why don't we have more analysis about designing just that. I think this concept of transactional object is key to further go that way.

And that's the hidden part of the success of pokemon go, the brand itself is a transactional object, it give common ground to people that don't know each other, it's a icebreaker, the game take advantage of that by giving everyone a common activity that allow bonding and sharing. What we can learn is how can we take advantage of situation with similar transactional potential.

 

So the objective would be to design a digital game that got people to physically interact in some small way with new people as an introduction to a meta game where they then spend time talking about the game & all that they've done, achieved etc in person rather than in an online forum?

 

More like, create an excuse for people to connect to each other, with a neutral icebreaker that act as common ground, ie a chitchat topic, something that is exciting enough to be talked about to a stranger, that you can encode your personality and preferences, and share them in a safe social setting.

You need to reinvent weather chatting , what you don't want is to devolve into religious like discussion, so having sharing, cooperation and other similar mechanics, on which you need to rely to each other to progress, help a lot, I mean asking for help is a great way to make other feel comfortable and important, ie a reason to connect.

The principle is that the game is only accessory, it's a paradigm shift, the goal is to promote transaction. That's not entirely new, it's the concept of amae (social communication through personal expression) from sanrio (hello kitty). If you think about it, having a preferred pokemon allow to express individuality (the preference) inside a common ground (pokemon lore) without actually engaging yourself too intimately. Individuality through belonging is meaningful.

Tradition and festivity use to hold this same power, you see the same pattern in fandom, people gather around a common passion, they organized real life events to meet each other. I'm saying we can use, support and expend that as mechanics within a game (and the service around the game, think blizzcon but embed in the game structure, like lure in pogo or gym). AR and geolocalisation therefore become just better tools to achieve those goals.

 

Pokemon certainly is having some of that effect at breaking down barriers to communicating with strangers. Its now perfectly acceptable to ask a random stranger in the street if there is anything good in the area. Or to randomly grab another team member on the street to tackle a gym.

I'm not sure if this was deliberately designed for, but it does prove its possible.

 

Even thought I'm a big fan of the IP (love the pokemon console games, emerald is my favorite ) I haven't played it, and I don't want to play it either because there's no strategy nor history involved, it just grinding.

Don't get me wrong I think they did a great job by making it a social thing, but I fell it only attracts the casual and/or nostalgic players that want to make friends and do some micro-management while commuting.

 

I'm already started to see some of the hype die down a bit, but according to their panel at SDCC they plan on adding a lot more to the game, so maybe some of these things are adding in more depth to keep people interested. ("It is only at about 10% of where we want it.")

 

Well I guess the problem is all the pokemon are in the major cities, so if you live in burbs your SOL. Im only level2 so far.

Does anyone know how easy it would be to map that vr google map? into your own game. That would be cool to make some kind of zombie run game for runners

 

While the distribution is far from uniform, the game is still playable in the suburbs and small towns. At least from all the reports from my family in those places.

That said, we make visits to the CBD with the specific purpose of catching Pokemon.

 

Try mapity, open map and geolocalisation

 

The more I play it the more I think the game is broken, not just because it's bugged as hell but because everything has been trown there without any long term thinking.
1- Team variability. In my area everybody is blue, like 98% blue, 1.5% red and 0.5 yellow. What's the point of team now here?

2-Gyms. It's less than 2 weeks that launched here and already many gym have pokemon on the 1500 range with team of 5-6 pokemon. Give it another month and new players won't be able to enter the game cause it will have to fight pokemon 100 times stronger. It's like playing an FPS where the matchmaker always put you against the top players combined.

3-There is no sense of progression, even worse there is REGRESSION.
I've reached level 14 and captured around 60 kind of pokemon. Now the game is spawning always the same so it is becoming repetitive as hell. To make things worse the same crappy pokemon that took me 1 normal ball before, now require 3-4 mega balls...
And it's the same damn pokemon, just with higher cp but that mean absolutely nothing because it's not high enough to be used and will be just evolution fodder. So at lower levels the same pokemon were easier to evolve. does this make sense?!
In other games with fusion mechanics the higher the fodder the more xp it give you and it does reward you for the harder fight.

4-Evolved pokemon are worth less than their base form. Usually the rarer something is the more powerful is in a game, but here the evolved pokemon are found with crappy cp that take forever to power up and use tons of stardust.
It's much better to use the base pokemon found with high cp and evolve that. Kinda lose the excitement of finding evo monsters...

5-Gym battles are a total joke. Special moves are most of the time worse than the base attack because by the time you fire 1 special, you can fire 3-4 base attack dealing more damage.

6-Spawning suck. They should reward people going into remote areas to find pokemon as it is in the real game, instead they chose to use some kind of heatmap to spawn almost only in crowded place, totally make no sense.

I'm leaving the game until they introduce tons of new features, but I have a feeling in 1 month there will be less than 10% the current player base.

 

I don't know what most of that means, but it's still screaming "Pet Rock Fad 2016" to me.

 

That seens exactly like Ingress, just with a marketable IP.

 

So I've been digging more into various aspects of the design. One of the elements that is particularly fascinating is how casual PVP works in the game.

I wrote a blog post here: http://blog.boredmormongames.com/2016/07/solving-casual-pvp-pokemon-go.html

The short version is that gyms are heavily biased in favour of the attacker in order to have them change hand's frequently. It doesn't really matter how weak your pokemon are, or how new you are to the game, you always have a shot at winning at a gym.

 

POKEMON PRO Teacher quits her job to become Britain’s first full-time Pokemon Go player

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14959...e-britains-first-full-time-pokemon-go-player/

 

The number of initial downloads is not particularly interesting for a popular IP.

Pokémon was derivative from the beginning, and Go builds both on the previous Pokémon games as well as, for example, Sony's Invisimals and Microsoft's Kinectimals, both of which are AR games. Sony's in particular is old enough that it required an accessory to play on the original playstation portable (because it was missing a camera).

The social media features are largely derivative, too -- I'm the Mayor of Nowhere'sville versus I'm the Gym Leader of the Nowhere'sville Gym-- and aren't really anything we've not seen before. The question is will they retain enough interest three months, six months out to maintain a pool of players sufficient to continue the game, and what is the conversion rate between people downloading the app and people paying money for in game items.