Go back to Katherine’s blog post for the reasons why Pokemon Go is fun to play. This is true for Pokemon Go and it was true for WoW – although if I was to write a review (which I am not doing) I would say that this was truer for WoW than it is for Pokemon Go.
Just as for blockbuster larp, a known IP doesn’t only help with attracting attention and hype, it helps players to know what to do in the game.Ī blockbuster game is typically not all that innovative, but it must be reasonably bug-free, well designed, and accessible to players that haven’t played this particular genre of games before. Now you get to be a Pokemon trainer for real – something some people have dreamed about their whole life… Secondly, what you did in the virtual Pokemon games is essentially the exact same thing as you do in Pokemon Go: you walk around in the world searching for Pokemon, and you let Pokemon fight other Pokemon. Firstly, there is a large number of people out there who have grown up playing Pokemon.
However, with Pokemon Go the importance of the IP cannot be understated.
#Pervasive games full
While this definitely mattered to attract a first player base, it can’t be the full explanation since the game so very quickly attracted more players than ever had played the previous Warcraft games. It has often been argued that WoW was so immediately successful because it capitalised on the Warcraft brand. The fact that Pokemon Go is based on Pokemon – a very well-known brand and game concept – is the most important reason for its success. So let’s see if there are some commonalities. Neither of these games was the first of their kind, but somehow they manage to take an established genre to the mass-market and do it fast – they are blockbuster games. The success of Pokemon Go is similar of that of World of Warcraft ( WoW) in 2004. (Others not so much – despite the fact that there always is at least one or two on the market, the genre of location-based MMORPG seems to be doomed to fail.) Most of these were fun to use, had stable user bases, and some of them have been very good games. (I even hesitate to call it an Alternate Reality game, more on that below.) Although Botfighter was too early and launched while the technology was not ready for it, GeoCaching was successful already from its launch (in the year of 2000) and has around 3 million users worldwide, and since the IPhone came out we have seen games and entertainment apps like Foursquare, Zombies, Run!, Shadow Cities, Turf, SpecTrek, AgentX come – and very often also go.
Pokemon Go is not the first location-based game out there, nor is it the first mobile phone pervasive game or the first Augmented Reality game. These are all great points, but she calls her summary ’Why Pokemon Go Became an Instant Phenomenon’ – and I don’t think her article answers that question. To briefly summarise, she notices that the game is simple to pick up and play, that it gets us moving, and that it lets us connect with other people in the real world, rather than just online. One of my favourite researchers Katherine Isbister recently wrote a great blog post on the design features of Pokemon Go, explaining what makes it such a fun game to play. One more, and hopefully last, Pokemon Go post…
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