Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Marija Stošić, Senior Creative Planner, McCann Beograd
It’s only been a couple of months since the strange little game called Neko Atsume was the buzz of the Internet. Neko Atsume is simple: you download it to your phone, you get your own virtual garden, and then, with the help of some treats and toys, you lure cats to your yard to treat themselves, play and take a nap. And that’s it. A little bit of cute Zen with a single need at its core: no matter how slowly and relaxed all that happened, or actually, no matter whether anything really happened at all, you really, really want to collect them all!
Sounds familiar? Yes, perhaps, especially the part about collecting someone or something, if you participated in, or were, at the very least, aware of the Pokemon phenomenon of the late nineties…
Well, hello and welcome to the new, somewhat modernized nineties, and the world in which the extended reality game Pokemon Go is already more popular than Tinder in many countries, is just about to overtake Twitter, and is slowly setting its sights on the others as well.
What is Pokemon Go? An augmented reality game created by Nintendo with the help of a start-up run by people who worked on the project Google Earth. In short, cute-weird Pokemon creatures are all around us. With the help of the GPS and the clock on our mobile phones, the game distributes them in the streets, buildings and apartments of our cities (it seems they especially love bathrooms!). The point is to find them (all, all, I have to catch them all!), catch them with the help of poke-balls, then train them in “gyms” and then challenge the Pokemon of other players and so on…
Pokemon Go is definitely taking over the world! The number of players is growing each day. Central Park in New York is flooded with people who walk around looking for Pokemon, some are not sure what to do because their homes were labeled as Pokemon ‘gyms’, and there’s this guy who couldn’t be distracted from catching a critter even by his wife giving birth. If you pay attention to feeds on social networks it seems that Pokemon Go is already more popular than the Kardashian-Jenner crew. It’s quite possible! In fact, the popularity of this phenomenon is so huge that Snapchat had to react and add Pokemon Go Live Story to its structure in order to protect itself. How the others will react, and how soon, remains to be seen in the coming days and weeks.
Pokemon Go has an impact on reality day by day. Thieves have already figured out a new strategy; they wait for lonely players in remote locations that are known to be full of Pokemon. There are also the inevitable stories about privacy and the need to protect it. Relationships are being broken, new ones are being started and everyone is aching from all that walking… Well done Nintendo, perhaps they have accidentally succeeded – literally – to make the world move, which is what brands of sports equipment, food and juices have been trying to do for decades!
What, then, is the point? The numerous articles and studies about the Pokemon Go phenomenon have yet to be written, but these factors, or a combination thereof, probably have a role to play:
COLLECTING: Seriously contagious, because you have to catch another one, and then another one to add to your collection, and so on until you have 151 – at least for now. People love collectables. It’s been constantly proven in practice, just look at the generations that gather every four years at the Terazije fountain to exchange stickers.
THE REAL WORLD AROUND ME: Augmented reality games are still only gaining momentum, and it could be said that they have serious potential. The combination of the virtual and the real is apparently a big hit, and there is always a chance that kindred spirits will meet in the real world, who have a lot in common, even a Charmander or a Pidgey.
A PINCH OF NOSTALGIA: At least for the nineties children. :)
BE CUTE & BE COOL: Pokémon are sweet and strange, they are their own beings, and as such are cool, and today it’s important to be cool to be so readily accepted.
GEEKS ARE TOTALLY, FULLY, UTTERLY IN: Let’s face it, whether at Terezije or at the seaside, collecting Pokemon is master level geekery. Who hasn’t noticed all these superhero and fantasy films, series, SF marathons, heroines and heroes? Whoever has chosen to sleep through the last decade should urgently wake up and try to catch the last train to the hearts of geeks, because in the meantime, not only have geeks become in, geeks have become the mainstream.
What should brands do in the middle of all this Pokemon Go mania? It depends. If there is a possibility – and this goes for small, local businesses particularly– they could try to somehow get involved in the lifestyle of the game and its players (a fantastic article about this was written by Walter Chen for Inc.com). When it comes to the big brands, they can also get involved, but first of all they should analyze, dissect, understand and apply the concept to replicate the phenomenon, or better yet, use the right ingredients to create the next one.
Pokemon Go mania is here to stay. Writers are announcing its novelties, countries around the world are waiting to be entered on the list of territories where Pokemon Go can be officially played, and I could write about this a lot more, but I need to go. I think I saw a little yellow something called Pikachu, winking at me… there he is, at the door.