Have you heard? There’s this game called Pokémon Go, and it’s responsible for a radical new relationship to the city!
Think pieces are clogging Twitter and Facebook expounding the virtues of the augmented reality game that has lead distracted pedestrians off cliffs, into muggings, and straight to a corpse, while simultaneously and dramatically taking away attention from more pressing topics like, say, police brutality.
Here’s a pessimistic (cynical and snarky) round-up of some of the commentary making its way through the internet tubes:
“In our collective hunt for silly cartoon monsters, Pokémon Go players are discovering history and architecture left and right,” writes Mark Wilson for Fast.Co Design in an article entitled "Pokémon Go" Is Quietly Helping People Fall In Love With Their Cities.” In the optimistic article, Wilson notes how many Pokéstops – sites where you can find Pokémon – are real-world historical buildings and landmarks. They’re also strip clubs, abortion memorials, a Church of Scientology building, a memorial to confederate soldiers, the Holocaust museum, and even Auschwitz! Ah, the new urbanity!
“I’m hopeful they’ll look up when they get there,” he writes of two college kids “staring at their phones,” walking towards a “historic Pokéstop.” That being said, he also expressed worry that “you may look to your left at a stoplight and see someone catching a monster rather than paying attention to the wheel.” A well-placed concern, it turns out, as a man drove into a tree the other day trying to ‘catch ‘em all.’
“The game’s potential for educating players on the built environment is substantial,” writes Ross Brady for Architizer. “Some landmarks are accompanied by elaborate descriptions highlighting a building’s noteworthy features or individual elements,” he notes–perhaps one of five or six people to do so.
“With Pokémon GO entering the fray as one of the first mass-market adoptions of Augmented Reality technology, it offers architects, as stewards of the built environment, a moment to consider the level of involvement they’ll claim over this new frontier,” Brady concludes, exciting young architects around the world about a future in which they’ll design parametric Pokémon gyms in exchange for a Squirtle.
“Pokémon Go Has Created a New Kind of Flâneur,” reads the headline for Laura Bliss’ take on the meme for CityLab, which goes so far as to re-write a passage from Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” replacing flâneur with traîneur, and filling readers everywhere with spleen in the meantime.
Of course, Pokémon Go has not created a “new class” of flâneurs, those 19th century bourgeois wanderers described by Christopher Butler as observers, “whose aim is to derive ‘l’éternel du transitoire’ (‘the eternal from the transitory’) and to see the ‘poétique dans l’historique’(‘the poetic in the historic’).”
The flâneur is a detached observer of the city, while Pokémon Go players are obsessively attached to their phone, desperate for a new catch, while oblivious to their context. “But the true voyagers are only those who leave / Just to be leaving,” Baudelaire might say in response to Bliss’ directive, “Go forth and make Baudelaire proud.”
That being said, the comparison isn’t without merit. As Walter Benjamin writes in the Arcades Project, the flâneur “abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace”, and “shares the situation of the commodity.” The Pokémon Go player, likewise, willingly feeds the machine of the marketplace, as the app stealthily sucks up your data – from your Google docs to your emails to your location – like Team Rocket stealing Pokémon.
There’s too many articles to summarize ‘em all, but here are some worth a read:
14 Comments
Agree 100%. Perhaps there is some subconscious reading, but much less you would get walking down the street without a phone. I'd suspect most of the coverage is cynical in itself (as with most arch coverage, dishonest and insincere) so have at it.
Pokemon Go is a great metaphor for current arch media. (Except archinect, of course!) So called critics just wonder around aimlessly instagramming pictures of buildings, an elaborate game of Architecture Go, trying to convince somebody that random pictures have value. Most have abandoned it all together. When was the last building profile in the NYTimes? Arch journalism has been outsourced to PR that write the niche blogs nobody reads.
The only way to get clicks is to talk about things that have nothing to do with it. Just clicked on Arch Paper and it had a story on the front about Mike Pense.... once you go full retard, there's no going back. Fast Co design was always dumb, so no problem there.
Can we get any more old-school? jeez!
"The flâneur is a detached observer of the city, while Pokémon Go players are obsessively attached to their phone, desperate for a new catch, while oblivious to their context. "
This is the new normal. Deal with it, or keep complaining about who moved our cheese.
I don't mind Philistines, but don't bother me with 1000 think pieces where I'm supposed to consider it relevant to architecture, written by some hack
LiMX, i think you need to start making an app where pictures of historic or otherwise important architectural works fight each other. so if you go to notre dame cathedral and instagram a picture of yourself there, you will get a certain set of stats that would compete with someone who went to the villa savoye and instagrammed a selfie. your selfies would of course have to be trained and work as a team, so to win would be encouraged to collect all important works of architecture.
i read the headline for the article about the guy driving into the tree (not the article) and it made me think. if i get a self-driving car, can it be programmed to collect all pokemon without hurting the passengers? would i have to even be present to collect all pokemon then?
LiMX, you should read your local independent newspaper's architecture criticism column.
Piss off, leave Pokémon Go alone.
I can't speak to all local architecture critics. In New York, the two critics here seem to not cover architecture at all (NYTimes) or work around dumb narratives when they do (NYMag). Not suprising that both are actually music critics. I've heard Dallas and Chicagos are good but don't follow or live in those cities. Everything else is PR-written blogs or bland "urbanism" writing that most arch critics have become.
If you are in the mood for a dishonest narrative:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/53rd-street-library-okay-if-you-hate-books.html
Architecture Go: find the most eye catching part of a building and wrap the story around it. And yet they have no problem when the staircase concept is extruded into an entire building. All politics....
I'm also a little overwhelmed by all the think pieces.
But my favorite aspect of the game, so far, is the photography that results from having these stupid/cute looking Pokemon situated in either the most banal everyday environments or in highly specific real life scenes.
I've been purposefully ignoring every PokemonGo related article, but I'm so glad I read this one because Nicholas you are such a good writer! That Baudelaire quote is perfect.
I guess a lot of architects are mad about this.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-has-the-power-to-transform-retail-analyst-says.html
Try architecture Go - oh no wait, we should all go to the library and read Kenneth Frampton again. Why even use smartphones?
http://blog.perkinswill.com/pokemon-augmented-reality-and-the-future-of-urban-design/
That Magikarp is dead, tho, right?
can i catch pokemon with a desktop ap by just kind of walking around the park on google earth? that would be soooo much easier than actually going outside. they don't even climate control that place.
Wait what happened to Google Glass and VR think pieces? Guess it's the new flavor of the month. Kevin Lynch name deopping in Pokemon Go pieces are ... Too.... Much....
Most of all, I find the idea that the city is an amusement park or mall different than what I find interesting about architecture, which is its sustained real relationships to people. The tech revolution overall seems to be pushing a radically different philosophy in how we relate to everything: cars, people, places, one that is fragmented, amusing, conspicuous, rented-not-owned.
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