Pokémon Go, the novelty of nostalgia, and the ubiquity of the smartphone

Abstract

None of the elements that contribute to the phenomenon of Pokémon Go are particularly new. Augmented-reality and location-based games, artworks, and marketing campaigns have existed for well over a decade. Meanwhile, the Pokémon franchise of videogames, trading cards, comic books, and anime has existed for more than two. Even the data that Pokémon Go is built from is generated by players of Niantic’s earlier locative game, Ingress. If there is nothing “new” about the phenomenon of Pokémon Go, then what is there to learn from its rapid ascension in the cultural zeitgeist? In this article I maintain that it is the increased ubiquity of the smartphone and its tendency to reconfigure existing media and cultural practices that has allowed the novelty of augmented reality and the nostalgia of Pokémon to converge in a perfect storm of branding, design, preexisting data, and established technologies.