Pokémon GO - Designing for Good - Extra Credits

last time we discussed many of the dangers that real world games have to design around in order to be safe and enjoyable for everyone this time let's have the much more fun discussion about all of the amazing things bringing games into the real world can do if we design for [Music] it first off we can get people to notice the world around them this may seem like an odd thing given how many complaints there have been about Pokémon go players being oblivious to their surroundings but these sorts of games can highlight what a magical place we live in it's so easy to be too caught up in our daily lives to notice some of the amazing things about the places we live just the other day James was playing Pokémon go and it drew his attention to a mural that he' never noticed in his own neighborhood it showed him something new about his town and helped him to appreciate the place more but we can integrate this into design even further if we were to Simply divide up the globe into reasonable sized chunks say half a square mile or so and give players a small bonus if they visit every location

in an area it would encourage people to see everything around them and help make sure that they got to see some of the more obscure sites and hidden gems more than that if you can work things like links to Wikipedia or even small sourced blurbs about some of the more famous locations in your game you can give people an opportunity to self-educate with a little bit of effort every walk can become a small walking tour or what about historical locations like not just the places where a historical site or a landmark still exists today what about plac places where some historic event once happened or where some significant thing once existed if as a company you're willing to put in the time to include those it could give the player a window into another world one where the very ground they tread on takes completely new significance of course it would be difficult to have these specific locations affect gameplay in any way because locations are User submitted and the developer often just won't know that much about them but for a large enough game having special Rewards or events that at least fit the theme of some of the most well-known

sites around the globe seems like a way to enhance the game experience while getting more people excited about our shared Heritage these games also by their very nature get us excited about going outside again I had mentioned making the player notice the Magic in the real world but these games also make the real world magical things you never look forward to doing like walking the dog or running errands become joyful activities there is value in that which shouldn't be dismissed and then there's the fitness side of things Pokémon go actually does a decent job of getting people out and walking but there is even more potential there I'm certainly not a fitness expert so I'll try not to speculate too much here but a game company could easily work with people who are fitness experts in order to encourage players to walk an optimal amount per day or even to encourage running in a way that's thematic fun and at the same time very healthy I mean imagine having to run a half mile in 7 minutes in order to get away from a dragon or to capture some elusive agile monster and if technology akin to the Fitbit ever becomes a standard feature

of your phone there's a whole host of things we can do to get people to enjoy exercising enough to lead fitter happier lives there are also economic benefits to getting people out more my local coffee shop has a Pok stop right next to it they basically leave an active poke lure on it 100% of the time and every day I see people just sitting there hanging out ordering coffee doing work and catching Pokemon all the while Forbes did a whole article on how to use Pokémon go to help your small business and I love this Niantic gets to make money on all these businesses buying lures and small shops get to make their locations more appealing to customers which is way more cost-efficient than say repainting or installing fancy lights but there's also potential for Partnerships with large corporations which is a bit of a danger I worry about the day when people placement becomes a thing and corporations like Walmart or Starbucks can pay to have unique Pokémon appear in the middle of their locations these sorts of partnership deals threaten the magical nature of the game reduce the player to a commodity and encourage game companies toward

predatory practices it's a dangerous can of worms to open but realistically there's just no way to avoid it if games like these get big enough depending on the game though there might be ways to inoculate the audience against this with some subversive design at least a little as a side note if you ever wanted to walk a dangerous line you could use the phone camera's inherent ability to scan barcodes and to use barcodes as a random number seed to generate items in game on the one hand the designer in James just salivates at all the cool things you could do with that but on the other hand it's just Rife for abuse and someone's going to do it sooner or later but Pokémon go has shown that these real world games have a thousand other positive effects that I couldn't have even predicted animal shelters are organizing days for people to take the animals on poke walks the national parks in the US have seen a massive uptick in visitors and even in those cases where some unfortunate person finds a dead body or something because they were out looking for Pokémon for one it's good somebody found that body and two sooner or later some Pokémon Explorer is going

to find a person who's not dead who's injured or lost in some remote area and a life is going to end up being saved because Pokemon or some game like it has encouraged people to go outside but I think the greatest possibility and the greatest danger lies in truly opening up the platform imagine if you could design Adventures or dungeons for your local park or create a module for your neighborhood that anybody could run through it would require a game with far more mechanics than Pokémon go to work but I think that day will come and the idea of turning the places we love into magical adventures for our loved ones or into ROMs through history for our students is an enticing thought it's something that I hope to see come to pass unfortunately there is a design hurdle that I can't work my way around the possibility for a poorly designed level or a troll designer causing people to get hurt my hope is that somebody's going to find the solution though possibly one of you because I would love to be playing that game in 5 or 10 years time anyway I hope that you've enjoyed this look at the potential in real world

design see you next week [Music]