Players tell the inside story, what Pokemon Go will mean for the future of games | Photos & Video

“The servers go down quite often on this,” Harry explained, showing how the game uses his phone’s camera and GPS to project virtual Pokemon around the room. 

“Sophie has been off all day, and now she is back on,” he said.

A Rattata, the 19th First Generation Pokemon -- a small purple rat -- appeared on the table, as Harry lobbed virtual Pokeballs to capture it.

The game, developed by Niantic, uses augmented reality to bridge the real world with the virtual Pokemon world. Go became a national sensation the hours, and weeks following the national launch earlier this month. Since then, thousands of players around the country have downloaded the app and set off on the chase, with some even travelling across the state to collect Pokemon.

“I met this guy from Taree, who said he had come from Taree because he was chasing Pokemon. He had no reason to be in Inverell but to be Pokemon hunting,” Sophie said.

Niantic, a Google breakout company, had similar albeit more niche success with Ingress in 2012, an earlier augmented reality game. By 2015, Ingress had around seven million players across the globe.

By comparison, Pokemon Go was released in the US, New Zealand and Australia and is now registering millions of players. Server crowding, according to Vox.com, has delayed global launches.

Though the release is leading app store top grossing lists, the explosive popularity of the game may not be a flash in the pan like some predecessors. For players, Pokemon Go has emerged from an increasing market for other-reality development and a well-established fan subculture reaching back to the early ’90s. 

The advent of a widely accessible other-reality playing experience has been on the fringes of the gaming community for some time, before arriving in spectacular style this month. For many, including several global development companies exploring virtual and augmented reality technology, Pokemon Go is heralding the future of gaming -- one that blurs the boundaries between real and virtual worlds and increasingly relies on a highly social experience for players.

Several leading development companies have announced virtual reality betas in recent months, like the Samsung Gear VR headset and the HTC Vive system, but it is games that exist in the boundaries between the fully-fledged real and virtual worlds that are not only hooking dedicated gamers but bringing a new generation of ‘social’ players into the spotlight.

“Augmented reality is you have the world around you, and then there is an overlay. Think of it as a digital overlay on the world around you. So, the table is still there, you still see the table, and things interact on the table,” Inverell computer technician Ridge Wilkins explained.

“So, Pokemon will appear on the table or, as Josh found, he had Pokemon hiding on the shelves. That’s augmented reality; you see the world and it puts on a digital overlay. Virtual reality you have the glasses and things like that, and it creates a virtual world around you.”

Josh is Josh McPhee, the manager at The Dust Jacket bookstore in Inverell. When he spoke with the Times recently, he and his organising team were in final preparations for Inverell’s first Pokemon Go gathering, ticketed to bring Go players together to meet, compete and catch Pokemon.

Estimates following the event on July 24 ran above 200, despite cold conditions on the day. Josh was stoked with the turnout and said it would not be the last Pokemon event Inverell would see. 

He said the social facet of the game were a new direction for immersive games, but the concept of an immersive social game did not start with Pokemon Go. Early early versions of Gameboy -- the hardware that made Pokemon a global hit in the 1990s pioneered a social playing experience. Now, the limitations that were once science fiction for old-school gamers are becoming real.

“Pokemon, itself, was a huge game in the ‘90s on Gameboy,” Josh said.

“Everyone loves the idea of being a Pokemon trainer and walking around and catching Pokemon. The problem was, on Gameboy you didn’t walk around anywhere because your little man moved around the world.

“Now, you basically get to be a real-time Pokemon trainer. So, you get to explore the forests and the lakes. And, it is geographically based so if you are near water, you are more likely to spawn water Pokemon; if you are in a park, you’re more likely to spawn park of foresty-type animals; if you are in suburbia, you will find different Pokemon.

The Facebook invitation to a two-hour walk and gathering at Victoria Park was a hot ticket in the weeks leading up to the event. It followed a similar invite on Friday, July 8, which showed more than 5000 Sydney players listed as “confirmed” to attend a city event, with more than 11,000 registering interest.

The incredible response has turned the game into a global social phenomenon, but the app is comparatively simple. Players cannot trade or battle the Pokemon they catch with other players, nor can they use caught Pokemon to battle those still in the ‘wild’. Nevertheless, Josh said it was the blurred lines between the real and virtual world, and the almost seamlessly social aspect to the gameplay that has made Go so accessible.

“It is encouraging people to explore and get out and about and meet up with people by going to these Poke-stops,” he said.

“You could originally trade between Gameboys, but it was a very physical thing. You had to plug the cord in, and you had to wait, and it was tedious. I think, eventually, (the developers) will have trading and battling for everyone, but it is still, very much, a new beginning,” he said.

“It (older Pokemon versions) was always a social game, but in an exclusive or an individual setting. It was your game. Someone else might be playing the same game a little further from you, but you still talked about it, you could compare Pokemon, and it was a social thing.”

Now, the augmented reality platform has exploded the social aspect, transforming it from a definitive feature to a seemingly ever-present by-product of playing, with considerable effects forecast for the future of gaming and game culture.

“The game itself isn’t anything ‘Wow, huge!’. We get out with our friends to look for Pokemon and enjoy ourselves,” Back in the Inverell High School staff common room, Harry explained, with Jack, Jack and Sophie, why Go has proven to be the coveted ‘billion-dollar’ app.

In the past few weeks, Nintendo stocks ballooned around 50 percent as players scrambled for the game, but suffered an equally rapid depression as it emerged Nintendo have little direct connection with the app.

Go was developed in collaboration between Niantic, a Google breakaway, and The Pokemon Company – of which Nintendo owns around a third. As news emerged that license profits would be limited owing to the distant connection, Nintendo stocks took a 17.7 percent dive in the weeks following the Go launch on July 6 but, according to the BBC, Nintendo stocks are still up by almost 60 percent since the app’s release.

But for Jack Roussos, “the best part of the game is it’s an excuse to go out with your friends,”

Sophie Myhill added: “Pokemon has been around for years”, but it is the social aspect of the game that has everyone talking.

The students were not alone in their opinion. In the weeks following the launch, Go whitewashed app store top lists, Josh and Ridge recalled.

“Already, more people have downloaded this than people have downloaded Tinder,” Ridge said with a grin.

“It has more downloads than Twitter in the US, and has more run time than Facebook in the last two weeks, as an average daily app loaded,” Josh added.

From early days of hardwire connections between Gameboys, players are now interacting and experiencing the game from the inside -- a virtual film over the real world.

For hardcore and casual gamers alike, Pokemon Go is bringing people together who might not otherwise have met.

“I was with my friend pretty late, and I left my car at the park,” Harry said. 

“I was walking back to the park, this is at 10pm, and there were still people sitting on the benches, walking around on their phones.

“I didn’t feel intimidated because …

Sophie jumped in: “They were all playing Pokemon.”

Josh and Ridge had a similar anecdote.

“We were in the park, and there was a group of four of us guys in our mid-20s. There was a 20-year-old girl who came up. She was by herself, in the park at 10.30 at night,” Josh said.

“She was on the same team as us, and we talked for 15 or 20 minutes.

“There was a group of boys. There was four or five of them, around 14 or 15-years-old. They came up, and all of a sudden you’re connecting with different groups you wouldn’t normally talk to.”

Both Josh and Ridge and the Inverell High team agreed immersive gaming had its stigmas for seclusion and introversion, but they also agreed in greater part the success of Pokemon Go was its social component.

“That is the big issue with gaming,” Josh said.

“It separates you. But people want that escape, but they also want to connect. That’s why people have the headsets. Whereas this takes you out of your room.”

Ridge took a different approach.

He said, the concept of escaping to another world has been around as long as spoken word, and certainly as long as books. Virtual reality, he said, was the “ultimate escapism”.

“You jump into a book because you want to be someone else,” he said.

“The augmented reality is you want to be you in the world. Your world is still you, but you have that extra bit in there.”

“I guess it is an odd thing because it is what’s in and what’s out,” Harry said.

“They took a really big leap making this Pokemon Go. They knew they had this huge fan base.”

The question for Jack, Jack, Harry and Sophie was: What makes the billion on the billion-dollar app?

Pokemon Go was released in Australia for free on July 6, and the developers have not taken the same approach as many app developers. The game has premium features to help players rise through the ranks more rapidly but, as Ridge explained, “it has that aspect that if you push it, you can win”.

“You can buy certain things, but I haven’t bought a single thing in the game, and I’m on level 11.”

Jack Staader said some gamers consider purchasing premium features to be a kind of cheating -- describing a kind of cheaper win to beef up accounts without, in the case of Go, sometimes literally ‘walking the distance’ to capture the prize.

But Harry took a different standpoint. Developers, he said, need to make wages.

“When you put out a free game there is not a massive amount of revenue,” he said.

“There is no ads in this. You can pay for the coins. But, there is no advertisement in it, and they have to make their money somehow.”

When asked how the computer science students would turn a free game into the coveted “billion-dollar app”, Harry said: “You either charge 99 cents to play it, or you start using ads.”

“You can make it so you can watch an ad to get this (particular thing). That is what a lot of people do.”

But, he said, Pokemon Go was a unique case.

“That is the turning point here. They have not made purchases completely necessary, but they have made it so that ‘this will be so much easier if you go and pay for this’.”

Though Pokemon Go skyrocketed in the weeks after the launch and is tipped to do nothing but grow as launches roll out across the globe, both Harry and Jack Roussos said it might have its declining moments as well.

Josh said the breaking point for Go would be how the developers find the balance between the dedicated, even professional gamers and game culture that form the foundation for Go’s popularity, and the increasingly social, casual player culture that propelled the app from cultural niche to the mainstream.

“If it goes too gamer specific (it could break),” Josh said.

“It will have to appeal to everyone.”

But Ridge said the breaking point could be transforming the game into a more pay-to-win focus.

“A lot of games have fallen into the trap,” he said.

Sophie agreed, saying she would quit the game if she had to pay.

For both groups, balancing the books between developers succeeding financially and the increasing demand for an all-for-nothing gaming experience for players was the tipping point between the elusive billion-dollar app and the app that almost was.

In that case, Pokemon Go may have tipped the scales, providing a widely accessible other-reality experience for next to nothing.

The Go release was a rupture in the gaming community, drawing increasingly clearer classes of player and a delineating a wider divide in the technology they favour, from the die-hard’s virtual reality and the everyman’s augmented reality.

 “(Virtual reality) is a different market,” Josh said.

“AR is probably -- it is more accessible because it is on your phone. VR will be for the diehard. It will be for the 10 percenters, and then in a few years time it might leak down to the 20 and 30 percent of gamers and be more accessible, but this (augmented reality) is now. This is on your phone without a big video card or a big unit.”

Ridge agreed: “(Virtual reality) will take off to a point where people want to leave the world. That is what games have always done. People want to leave the world and experience a world through someone else’s eyes.”

Harry Jorgensen and Jack Staader explained the high cost of building computer systems that could handle virtual reality tech meant a wider community of casual players were more attracted to augmented reality, but Ridge said the more developed of the two was virtual.

“A basic entry level VR kit, you’re looking at about $1500 for your computer and then another $800, or whatever it is, for the Vive system,” he estimated.

Jack Staader added to the estimate: 

“The VR headsets are very expensive, but PlayStation is making one that is so much cheaper than the rest. It’s going to be admittedly worse, but it’s going to be a VR headset,” he said.

Whether virtual or augmented, other-reality spaces have an X-dimension -- the ‘other’ in the other-reality.

In a New Yorker Radio Hour podcast published on May 13, comedian and virtual reality connoisseur, Reggie Watts described virtual reality as something that must be “weird and colourful, emotional and demoralising. Not distracting”.

“Virtual reality seeks to allow us to interact with the computational world as a seamless thought sphere,” he said.

“Virtual reality should be fun. Something really strong and sincere -- a candy bar that really satisfies.”

Watts described a thought sphere as a representation of consciousness, either synthetic or organic.

For Ridge Wilkins, the ‘candy bar’ of virtual reality comes from a dimension of virtual spaces that only exists in VR -- and X-dimension. He described it last week as the “dimension of thought” He said it was the space where all physical restrictions of the real world are removed and replaced with a kind of rampant creativity.

“Playing certain games will give you a little bit, but when you get into virtual reality where everything around you is completely different -- and isn’t the world you were taught -- that is that extra dimension.”

Though the social aspect of gaming is not particularly new for many players, the now widely accessible augmented reality of Go has extrapolated the social networking world and blurred the lines between the real and imagined worlds.

For Josh and Ridge, it was the next evolutionary leap for players and games.

“I think it is probably the way things are going with games,” Josh said.

“If you look at the computer gamers, or X-Box or Playstation, they all have the headsets, they are talking in-game, they are talking out-of-game. The extreme gamer is talking to people outside of games too. They have their social network.

“This brings like-minded people interested in playing Pokemon, or any game really – it is Pokemon now – it probably gives them a medium to talk. 

“If you see someone on their phone at a Poke-stop, it’s pretty guaranteed what they are doing.”