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Reviewed by:
  • Pokémon Go
  • Eiko Kitao
Pokémon Go

Being a parent of two school-age children when the original Pokémon craze began, I could not resist when Pokémon Go was released last summer, a nostalgic and exciting game that was overlain on a pre-existing geocache application. Needless to say, this geographer was intrigued!


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When the game came out, it was hilarious watching people amass at popular Pokémon spawn locations, racing back and forth to be rewarded with a coveted, rare Pokémon. The general population was using GIS applications and reading maps with little or no prior experience at all. Young children were orienting themselves to a known location, or a Pokéstop, and getting there without a thought. Children were going outside, riding [End Page 255] bikes, running, walking, skateboarding, and finding any means possible to get from one Pokétop to the next before the Pokémon fled. The ingenuity behind the game was the use of a pre-existing, location-based mobile platform that Niantic Labs had already created that “takes you to local landmarks and quirky points of interest all in order to collect rare monsters” (qz.com).


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Last summer, I spent every evening picking up my six-year-old niece and my nine-year-old nephew and going on nightly jaunts across town, searching… searching. You could always tell when a rare Pokémon spawned because a crowd would form, whether it was at a church parking lot at 2 a.m., or a dark, unlit park that no one would dare venture into. The craze was everywhere! I began to see a crowd of “regulars” and we would meet each night and collect Pokémon together. A Facebook group page was created and people would post locations when rare Pokémon were found.

Businesses started capitalizing on the Pokémon Go craze. Bars and restaurants that were lucky enough to have Pokéstops at their establishment would set out multiple Poké Lures to attract Pokémon to a Pokéstop as a way to get customers to enter their business. I even drove through Las Vegas and there were casino marquees advertising Pokéstops at their locations! [End Page 256]


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I found a way to capitalize on this myself. I became an Uber driver two years ago, and when the Pokémon craze hit, I advertised to drive people around town, hitting all the hotspots for Pokémon collecting. I didn’t think much of it when I posted my ad, but before long, calls began to trickle in and people wanted to use my services.

By the beginning of 2017, the Pokémon craze had slowed down and people were abandoning their quest for completing their Pokédex. The release of Gen 2 (the next evolution of Pokémon) did not happen soon enough, and, coupled with the promise of trading Pokémon and battling friends that never materialized, Pokémon Go took a hit in popularity.

As a geographer, I see the potential that a game like Pokémon Go has for teaching geographic applications to the general public or incorporating geography in the classrooms, whether through the Pokémon app itself or through creating similar, location-based, interactive, augmented applications. The idea of research being presented through a platform like this, or geography lessons conducted through interactive applications, has the potential for paving the way to new and innovative teaching methods.

Even as the Pokémon Go craze begins to wane and a large number of people have turned their interests elsewhere, the concept of interactive geography-based applications has been introduced, and the potential to utilize this application in a geography curriculum is unsurpassed. [End Page 257]


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Skyline Court in Santa Barbara, shaped like a Pokéball (Google Maps).

Today, there are still a few die-hard gamers like myself who are one or two Pokémons away from completing the first Pokédex and are still out there playing the game, but the momentum...

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