Please don’t move this to games. It is not about the game. Pokeman has only been out for a few weeks and people all over town are walking around like zombies playing this game. People head out to work and never make it because they are too obsessed. It seems obvious this game is triggering something, what is it?
A feeling of accomplishment without all the hard work required to accomplish something meaningful?
High School Gang “Follow the Leader”.
Do what everyone else is doing. Don’t be a leader, follow. Don’t think on your own.
It is augmented reality, which is cool and interesting and exciting and new.
Taking drugs augments reality, too. So maybe it’s a safer acid trip.
It’s just a game. And it’s doing what it is intended to do like all games. Entertain/escape. The only difference between pokemon go and most other games is that you can leave your house and still play, so you see it more. I know plenty of people who have blown off work when other games have come out, but you don’t see them because they are at home on their couch playing.
So to answer your question, Does Pokeman mimic a primal human behavior? yes, entertainment.
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Hunting?
It reminds me of an old fashioned scavenger hunt.
Getting the clues through your phone instead of hidden messages.
I haven’t played the new Pokemon game, but in playing Warcraft and seeing some of the designs of Facebook games, I think that gambling is another big part of the success of these games. You perform some sort of repetitive task and, occasionally, a prize pops out. People seem to like non-sure deals. I don’t know exactly how Pokemon plays, but the description leads me to believe that there may be an element of that.
Collecting.
I always refer to this as the panning for gold phenomenon. A gold minor will pan through so many pans of gold before he gives up. If he finds one nugget it might get him through another 500 pans with nothing and so on.
It’s been long established that reward systems in video games trigger all sorts of happy brain chemicals. Pokémon Go isn’t especially innovative in its core gameplay - most of what it’s doing has been done before. But it IS leveraging an IP that had an enormous built in fanbase, and it’s iterating on some things (AR, geocaching) in a very approachable manner.
First came the mindless with buds in their ears, oblivious to any outside auditory cues. Next came the texters who shut out all outside stimulus. Texters with buds devolved even further. Now with Pokémon Go, the zombification of the citizenry is almost complete.
E-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t…