How Pokemon Go Works

stories around it. You've probably heard quite a few of them already. I'm going to kind of cover a lot of that in today's episode. And yes, I have played Pokemon Go. I am of an age that is over the age of forty, which means that I was too old, or rather too old is probably the wrong way of putting it. I was not the right age demographic for

Pokemon when it first debuted, so it missed me. I found myself mostly mystified by what Pokemon was, didn't really understand when, uh, you know, the kids on the lawns started talking about pokemons, which I understand they think is not at all funny, which is the reason why we old people keep saying it that way. Um, I wasn't really in that age group, so I didn't get it. It was kind of like magic the gathering. I didn't

get into that. So people who were really into it, I it was like talking a different language whenever I chatted with them. But now I played Pokemon Go a bit, I'm starting to understand. I obviously, UH don't have the depth of knowledge of the players who have been with it since the very beginning, but I'm I'm starting to actually understand what it is they're talking about now, which is interesting. Uh. It is an interesting game, and I

see where the appeal is now. So let's talk about a history of Pokemon itself before we get into Pokemon Go and the company that created it. Uh. That goes back to it's when a young man named Satoshi to Jerry came up with an idea that would evolve into Pokemon. Evolution, by the way, plays a big part in the Pokemon universe, but I just happened to have chosen the word evolve there to Jerry had already founded a video game magazine

earlier in the eighties with a couple of friends. That magazine was called game freak, and he had even pitched a few ideas to different game companies in the past. He won a competition, I believe for Sega to pitch a game idea in the early eighties. So he had really loved video games for quite some time, to the point where his his academic performance was suffering back when he was in school, and had always been at least wanted to be part of the video game culture and industry.

Now to Jerry, also, as a kid loved to catch things like tadpoles and insects. He loved to catch and collect them, and uh, he began to think about maybe making a video game that had a similar kind of purpose to it, like the idea of catching and collecting things. And he had also seen the game Boy mobile device, the handheld gaming console, as well as the game Link cable which allowed two game boys to link together for competitive or cooperative play, and it got the ball rolling.

He started thinking, well, what if I created a game in which players seek out creatures to collect, then they could also maybe trade creatures with each other. So let's say I catch two of the same thing, and I have two of them, but my friend doesn't have any of them, but my friend does have another creature I do not have. Maybe we can make a trade happen.

And then he thought, well, what if we could also have these creatures compete against each other create a competitive gameplay element, And so he pitched this idea to Nintendo. At the time, he was calling it Capsule Monsters, the idea being that you would use these little capsules to capture the monsters themselves, and then the monsters would emerge

from the capsules. This was similar to some uh uh some some Japanese shows that he liked a lot where monsters and and creatures could pop out of seemingly impossibly small containers. So you've got this tight little container that suddenly pops open, and a creature much too large to fit that container is there. He wanted to have that

element in it as well too. Jerry initially met with some resistance from Nintendo when he was pitching this idea, but eventually he got the green light to develop the game. So over the next six years he refined his idea and worked with the video game studio Creatures to create it. They changed the name from Capsule Monsters to pocket Monsters or Pokemon after in honoring a trademark Hurdle with the original name, and the game launched in Japan in February

nine six. It's a very simple game, where you're simple is being too dismissive. It was simple in concept. You would capture these creatures and train them and and have them battle other creatures and earned badges, and it was really compelling gameplay. It struck a nerve, became extremely popular, and two years later in it would come over to North America and also find a lot of popularity here. Now again that basic idea is simple. Player takes on the role of a trainer. A trainer can seek out

and catch Pokemon. There's several broad categories of Pokemon, and some are more effective at battling one type of creature over a different type of creature. It's like a really complicated version of paper rock scissors. So you've got a Pokemon that's of a certain type. It's more effect of against creatures that belong to a different type, and less effective against creatures who belong to a third type. So you want to make strategic use of your Pokemon to

maximize your ability to beat your opponent. Now you're not guaranteed to win or lose just because the type of Pokemon you use is matched well or poorly against another one. There are other elements at play here. It's not just the type, but the type has a big influence. It is definitely much easier to win if your type of Pokemon is better suited against your opponent's type. So not

a guarantee, but definitely easier. Now, this idea became a bit more complicated with the game mechanic of evolving Pokemon into more advanced versions of that creature. Uh. In other words, you could end up having your Pokemon transform, kind of

like going from caterpillar to butterfly. In fact, there are several Pokemon that have a transformation that is similar to that, and when they evolve, they typically are more powerful, their attacks are different, uh, and generally speaking, they are better than they were before. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the general idea now. The initial attraction is

that concept of collecting. To Jerry knew that lots of people find satisfaction and seeking out and obtaining stuff like almost like a scavenger hunt or treasure hunt. This was one that had randomness inserted into it, so it wasn't that you were absolutely certain to run into a specific type of Pokemon at a specific point in the game. There was a lot of chance that was involved as well, and that led to that phrase that has been associated with Pokemon ever since. I got to Catch them All.

You had to catch all the different types of Pokemon out there. And in that initial Pokemon game that came out for the Game Boy or games, I should say, there were about a hundred and fifty one of them. Hundred and fifty of them were published before the game even came out, or announced before the game came out. The hundred fifty first, which was Mew, was kept as a secret until after the game came out, and the

games were insanely popular. They inspired manga and anime series, They inspired toys, they inspired a trading card game as well as other merchandise, and there have been multiple games in the series. Typically, later games would add even more Pokemon and more evolutions to the world, so you would get a lot more with the various uh additional versions of the game that came out. So that's the history of Pokemon in a nutshell, a very short version. Let's

talk about the technological foundation for Pokemon Go. So you've got Pokemon that's going like gangbusters. It's incredibly popular across multiple forms of media. Uh, it is right for a new implementation into a game. Meanwhile, around the same time, you have a technological development and augmented reality that is creating the opportunity for this game. But that that opportunity didn't just spontaneously happen to To look at the development of Pokemon Go, you have to look at a company

called key Hole Incorporated. Now Keyhole started in two thousand one. It was a private startup company in Silicon Valley, and it received financial backing from lots of investors, you know, like Sony was a big investor. Also a big investor was a venture capital fund that was connected to the c i A, the Central Intelligence Agency. So you probably have heard that Pokemon Go was created by a guy who got funding from the c i A. That's an oversimplification,

but the CIA was interested in fun Keyhole. And what was Keyhole doing. They were creating detailed maps with geospatial data incorporated directly into those digital maps. In other words, you would be able to create a digital globe that had an accurate representation of what was in any specific region. Um. And as you've got more data about stuff that was in that region, you could add it to the map

and make it more accurate. Uh. And so you have think of like a a very accurate local map and then just expand that to be for the entire globe. It was not a small undertaking, but Keyhole went after it. One of their early products was called Earth Viewer, which looked like a primitive version of Google Earth. You probably have seen Google Earth. In fact, it became the basis for Google Earth. The company gained recognition in the early two thousands as news programs ranging from CNN to ABC

and CBS. We're using the software to create visualizations of different cities around the world, particular pularly for wartime footage. So you have this very dramatic look as a camera seemed to zoom in on a virtual globe all the way down to a level where you could see specific buildings. UM. It is very effective in that way, very dramatic, especially

for the early two thousands. Now, the CEO for a Keyhole Incorporated it was a guy named John Hank who has continued to be a very important part of this entire process. Now in two thousand four, Google purchased Keyhole Incorporated for a cool thirty five million dollars. Google was busy trying to create the Google Earth product and saw the value of acquiring the Keyhole software and expertise. Now, if you've never used Google Earth, it is an interactive

digital globe. You can zoom in as if you're descending an altitude over the Earth, so you can look at it from a view of your looking at Earth from space, and then you can zoom in closer, so you start getting details. And those details originally as you descend will be from satellite imagery. As you continue to zoom in, that will give way to images that were created through aerial photography, so you get better detail and definition. And then if you continue to zoom in, you start seeing

three dimensional representations of landmarks and buildings. Um So, for example, I took a look at a three dimensional version of the office building we work in, which is at six seven five Constantly and Avenue. If you want to take a look at that in Atlanta, Georgia, and open Google Earth, you can pull up a view of the building we work in. It is enormous. We have a very small space in that very large building. Um it's not a very small space to us. To us, it's large, but

in the context of the building it's very small. Anyway, you can get these three dimensional views, so it's like you are virtually at that location. You can even uh do navigation from one point to another and it'll be as if you are going through the streets to get from point A to point B, making all the turns necessary. And this sort of stuff has been built up in Google Earth over time. It's not like Keyhole came in and created Google her Google Earth, um uh the way

it is now right off the gate. It has been a process, so things like that three dimensional representation of buildings that took time to develop. And over the years, Google offered a few different versions of Google Earth, including a commercial version that businesses would pay for in order to incorporate Google Earth capabilities into websites or programs of some sort. So, in other words, if you were a company and you are creating a a program to show

the effects of your business. Maybe you're a construction company and you want to show off some of the buildings that your construction company has built in the past, that might be a good implementation of it and Google actually sold a commercial product, which these days is free, but at the time you had to pay something like four hundred bucks for a copy. So when Keyhole came over, Hank remained on board and continue to work on Google products.

In Hank created a department within Google itself called Nyantic. So this was a startup company kind of thing, but it was within Google itself, so it wasn't a separate company. It operated kind of like a company, but under the corporate identity of Google itself, so it's sort of a division slash startup. The group took its name from a whaling ship that operated out of San Francisco during the gold rush days. At one point that ship was dragged

onto shore and eventually it was built over. And Hank said, you know, San Francisco is like this. You've got all these ships that were eventually just kind of incorporated into the landscape of San Francisco, or or are underneath San Francisco. And he said that gave him the idea that the world around us often has a lot of treasures that are not evident just upon first glance, that you know,

you would have to have this revealed to you. And so he liked the idea of creating technologies that would augment reality so that we could reveal those things to us, or even appear to reveal things that were not actually there. In other words, imagine having an app that can transform the space around you so that it looks like a fantasy medieval setting. That's the sort of stuff that you could do. Or just an app that allows you to walk down a city street and take a look at

what it was like a century ago. That's the sort of stuff he was thinking of. Niantic, by the way, is also the name, or at least the Anglicized name, of the Nhantucket tribe, who are Native Americans that lived in New England. Presumably, I would, uh say, that's the source of the whaling ship's name. So Niantic Labs takes its name from a whaling ship, which in turn took

its name I assume at least from a Native American tribe. Now, Niantic labs first product was called field Trip, which was a mobile app that provides tips for stuff to do based upon your location. Actually had this on my phone for a while. Uh I felt that it was a little limited in its use, but the idea is kind of cool. Like let's say you're walking down a street that you haven't been down before. Maybe it's even in

a city that you're visiting for the first time. Field trip might point out cool places for you to go to, like museums or theaters that you might be interested in, or maybe even that a music group you happen to like also happens to be play being at a venue near you at that time, or it might show you like restaurants you would enjoy based upon your preferences, that kind of stuff. In two thousand and twelve, Nyantick would publish its first augmented reality game, and that was Ingress.

So you may have heard that Pokemon Go was kind of built upon the foundation of Ingress, and a large part that's true. We actually covered Ingress back on uh an episode of tech Stuff way back in two thousand and twelve, So you can go back and listen to that classic episode of tech Stuff and listen to what we thought Ingress would be like at that time. It was still i think in beta when it we did that episode. At any rate, the game requires players to

visit real world locations in order to participate. Inside the game, you have to walk around the real environment and use your app to interact inside a virtual environment that's overlaid on top of the real environment. That's the augmented reality thing. It enjoyed modest success among certain population. On the whole, I would say that Ingress was rather a niche game. Um people in the tech industry were more likely to play it, I imagine, than folks who are outside of it.

It didn't have as broad an appeal as something like Pokemon. Now, important locations within the game Ingress are mapped to real world locations, and you have to go to those real world locations in order to interact with the game, at least if you're as long as you're not like gaming the system by spoofing your phones geolocation, which is something that technically you could do, but it's not with the

spirit of the game. So Nyantick was tapping into Google's massive database of geotagged photos in order to populate the game with initial locations. So let's say that there's a famous outdoor sculpture and there's been tons of photos that are geo tagged that have been uploaded into Google's databases Google Photos, or something along those lines. Google could say all right, well, this sculpture is at this particular location,

it is of cultural value. We're going to create a portal inside the game that is tagged to that location, and in order to interact with that portal, you have to go to where that sculpture is. The idea being that this will encourage people not just to play the game, but to explore their environments, to go to places that they might not go to before, and to encounter things of historical and cultural significance, and and get a better

connection to their the world around them. That's kind of idealistic. You may be thinking, well, whenever I see people playing Pokemon Go, they're just staring at their their phones. They're not looking at anything else around them. But it's not for lack of trying anyway. Niantic also allowed players to take GEO tagged photos of locations that they thought should

be in the game. So let's say that you're walking down the street and you see this amazing mural that's painted on the side of the building, and you pull up Ingress and you look at Ingress and there's no portal associated with that mural, and you're thinking, well, that's a shame. This should really be in the game so that people can see it and appreciate it, and also just so it can you know, be part of the game. Well.

Ingress would allow you to take a photo of that mural and upload it so that the team over at Niantic Labs could review it and decide whether or not that merited inclusion in the game, and if they thought it did, they would then create a portal inside the

game that would be tagged to that physical location. So part of the game was created through the data mining of Google's photos, part of the game was created through crowdsourced information from the players themselves, and all of that data that groundwork that ends up being the basis for Pokemon Go later on. So if you're wondering how did they come up with the idea for these partic or pocus stops or gems, those came from Ingress the work

that was done previously on Ingress UH. And so we should be thankful to Ingress players for creating that, or in some cases we should probably be upset at them because there have been some issues with trespassing UH and some UH some overcrowding in certain areas that have irritated certain folks. So both good and bad has come out of that ingress experiment. Also, I should point out that in some cases the sites that have been included are

kind of temporary art exhibitions that get replaced occasionally. So often I will see a pokas stop, pull it up, and I'll think, well, that's what this used to be, but it's not what it is right now. In fact, a theater I go to all the time used to be a church, and in Pokemon Go it still comes up as a church. It's not coming up as the theater.

But that's, you know, that's to be understood. It's there's The world is a big place, and Niantic keeping everything up to date would be uh, that's all they would be able to do. And even then they wouldn't be able to do it. They'd just be making a tiny dent in an enormous, enormous shield. So Niantic in two thousand and fifteen would leave Google. Google was restructuring at that time. You may remember we did an episode about this about Google becoming Alphabet or creating Alphabet as a

parent company and Google being underneath it. During that restructuring, a lot of stuff changed, and one of the things that changed was Niantic got spun off as its own individual, independent company. A month after it was spun off, Niantic Labs announced that it was working on a game called Pokemon Go. So it wasn't long after Niantic became its own independent entity that said we're gonna make a game in the Pokemon universe that is an augmented reality the game.

A month after they announced Pokemon Go, they held a round of funding and raised twenty million dollars from lots of different sources, including Pokemon, Google, and Nintendo. In early July, Pokemon Go entered beta testing with a relatively small group of users, and they wanted to test out the various features of the game, make sure that the stuff was working the way they intended it, and also to kind

of measure server load. And then they went and opened it up region by regions, so some regions like got the roll out a week or two after others. Nantick noticed that the demand for the game was way beyond what they expected, causing lots of server issues. Early on, there was such a demand on servers that, at least for some of us, more frequently than not, you saw the game was not working, You couldn't connect to a

server at all. Very frustrating if you happen to be someone who walks to and from work, and you think, I walk all the time anyway, Now I'm going to get rewarded for it, you know, besides that being outdoors fresh air exercise thing. Who needs that? I want my pokemons. But often I found myself unable to connect to the servers, and then I thought, well, there's no point in me walking anyway because I'm a sour pus. But what is Pokemon Go? What is the game? Well, currently the game

focuses almost almost entirely on collecting Pokemon creatures. That's the I would argue, the largest part of the game. There are other elements too, but this I think takes the precedent like it's the top priority, and you collect characters by walking around the real world with the app open on your mobile device and active. That is an issue for some people because there's a bit of a bad

redrain with Pokemon Go. And you can turn some battery save features on and you can turn off augmented reality if you want to help extend your battery life on your mobile device, but you have to have the app open and active in order for you to encounter Pokemon and to interact with Pokus stops and that kind of stuff. So when you come into range of a Pokemon critter, typically you get a little sound effect and maybe your phone vibrates if you've set that on your on your device,

and it alerts you. You pull up your phone, you see it represented on the map, and you push the screen in order to activate the sequence that would allow you to attempt to catch it and add it to your collection. If you do collect it, and you had never collected one of that Pokemon ever before, you add it to your Poka Dex, your lexicon and Pokemon creatures,

so you've added it to your Poka Dex. After you encounter it and capture it for the first time, you get a little bit of an experienens bonus with that, so you can level up a little faster if you start encountering new Pokemon. And of course the more new ones you encounter, the fewer there are left for you to encounter, and that that kind of adds into that feeling that you have to go out and find the

ones that you have not yet tracked down. Catching a Pokemon in the first place involves swiping a poke ball. These are those capsules I was talking about that can encapsulate a Pokemon, even though the ball is much smaller than the creature you're using it on, typically in some

cases way smaller. If you read up on the various sizes of the of the monsters, and the ball appears at the bottom of your screen, you swipe your screen so that you throw the ball at the Pokemon, and if your a R mode is turned on, the Pokemon

is superimposed on the environment around you. Your your phone's camera will be on and the screen you look at will actually be a video like a not quite it's not like it's recording, but it'll it'll be a live view of whatever the camera's pointed at, and the Pokemon will be super imposed on top of that. If you turn a R mode off, it's just a little cartoon environment. And then either way you start swiping the ball toward the Pokemon and the Pokemon needs to hit the monster.

There's a little circle that will appear on the monster, and it will be a different color depending upon the ability, the strength of that Pokemon, and how hard it is to catch. So a green circle means and relatively easy catch, and the circle gets smaller until it gets down to until it shrinks down to you know nothing, and it

starts over again at the larger size. If you throw the ball in such a way that lands in the middle of the circle, you get a bonus, and depending on how big the circle is, the bonus can go higher or lower, like if it's a smaller circle and you hit the center, you get more points, more more bonus experience points. Just because you hit the a the pokemon with the ball doesn't mean you capture it, though. The pokemon can have an attempt to escape, and if

it does you have to keep on trying. Sometimes it can actually just get away and you're just left with nothing. Um it could be kind of tricky to catch some of these pokemon, even if they are relatively easy you know to catch, like if the circle is green, particularly if you're walking a dog, because my dog Timble doesn't understand that he needs to be still when an ev is in the area. He hasn't feared that part out yet. Um. So you can actually increase your chances now catching pokemon

within the game by using various items. There are berries that will decrease the pokemon's um desire to escape. There are better poke balls that have a better chance of keeping a Pokemon captured, but that's the basic idea is just collect as many of them as you can. Now,

once you collect them, you can also upgrade them. You can spend some points called star dust and some pieces of in game currency called candy that are specific to each type of Pokemon, So you can use those points and candy to increase your Pokemon's ability to to do more damage in combat or to withstand more damage in combat as well. Uh you can also use that candy to evolve a Pokemon if you have enough of them, and if that Pokemon in fact has an evolved form.

Not all of them do, but they do, you can continue to collect those candy and use them to evolve your Pokemon. Typically, you get three candies of a specific

type every time you catch up pokemon. So if I caught a Rotata, which are one of the most common types here in Atlanta, then I would get three Ratatta candies for capturing the Rotata, and if I transfer the rotata, if I trade it in because I don't need it and I already got a billion other retatas then I get one more piece of candy in return for that trade. If you save up enough pieces of candy, then you can you can evolve your retata to its next form.

As the general idea and as of this recording, the creatures from the original Pokemon game are the only ones that you can find in Pokemon Go. And also some of those are legendary and will only be available during special times of the year, at specific events or particular locations, so they will be exceedingly rare. It will be very like you have to be in the right place at the right time, and you have to be lucky to

catch them. So, for example, in North America, there are one two of the hundred and fifty one Pokemon that are available. If you wanted to catch any of the others, you would have to travel to other continents. It's a little complicated. A few players in North America have already caught all of the ones that are available in North America. Um, it is not easy to do. Niantic did have some legendary Pokemon get out in the wild by accident. It was a coding thing. They shouldn't have been there, and

some of them were caught. So some people caught legendary Pokemon before it was supposed to officially be possible to do so, so what did Niantic do? They erased them. Those Pokemon are no more. If they were in someone's collection, they are no longer there. And that raised the ire of some players. Why are you punishing me for a mistake you made? And niantics response was, well, it it kind of breaks the game. They're not supposed to be out there, so we we erased them. That was a mistake.

We're sorry for it, but they're not supposed to be there. Niantics made a few updates to the game that have upset people. I'll get more into that in a second. Well,

one of them I can talk about right now. There used to be a an indicator on your screen that would show which Pokemon are closest to you, and there were a little acts that appeared below them, and the tracks were supposed to get be an indicator of how close or far away are those Pokemon, and the tracks were supposed to range from one to three, one track presumably meaning that it's closer to you, and three tracks meaning that you have to walk a little bit a

bit further to find them, but it's wasn't really working. All the tracks would show up as three, or you wouldn't get any change in the number of tracks, So you'd start walking in a direction, but you couldn't tell if you're getting closer or further away from the ones you were looking for. So eventually Niantic removed the tracks entirely. You still have an indicator that shows which pokemon or in your general area, but you have no way of

knowing what direction to go in. Another thing that Niantick removed was the ability of third party sites to help you track specific Pokemon. There were some third party applications that would give you a notice saying, hey, there's this particular type of Pokemon at this particular spot that's not too far from you. You should go there and try and catch it. Those capabilities have been removed now, and Niantic has had a lot of backlash from that as well.

Their argument was that it kind of allowed people to cheat, that they weren't really going out and exploring the way Niantic had intended the game to uh to cause people to do. Never mind the fact that a lot of people, even when they are out and about and quote unquote exploring they're really just looking at their phones and not looking around them. To replenish your supply of poke balls, those are the things you're using to catch the Pokemon Pokemon, Pokemon.

I knew it was a matter of time before I said it accidentally without irony, and there you go. But if you wanted to replenish your supply of poke balls or other in game items, one of the ways of doing that is to visit pokas stops. Now, these are associated with those real world locations to have some sort of cultural or historic significance, like public art or historic sites, landmarks, that sort of thing. These are the same sort of locations that you found the poor les in Ingress. It

was built on that same foundation. Uh. And you would visit these and spin a little graphic in your in your app, and that would generate the items that you would collect at. So, if you are in an area that has a lot of these places, it's pretty easy to very quickly fill up your inventory with all those items. If you aren't in an area that has a lot

of those locations, it gets pretty frustrating pretty quickly. Uh. And there are other items in the game that do things like increase the number of monsters you'll encounter within a certain amount of time or in a certain area, or the amount of experience you gain for each in game action you take uh little things that tweak the the experience of the game. And of course, as you play, your character levels up. Once you hit level five, you

can pick one of three teams. They are Team Instinct, Valor and mystic Um Team Mystic if you must know, go Blue. The team's really only come into play when the games are other mechanics pops up. That's Gym battles Gem as in g y M. That's the only other time. That really the only time that the team identity matters right now as of the recording of this podcast. So at certain real world locations there are Pokemon gems. Sometimes

they're actually associated with real gems. One of the ones that's close to my neck of the woods is at a yoga studio, So it's kind of funny to see people fiercely competing outside of a place where other folks are saying the musta and very hushed and relaxed tones. Anyway, if a gym is unclaimed, it shows up as gray and you can claim it on behalf of your team, whichever team you have chosen, and then you would choose a Pokemon from your collection to guard the gym and

hold it. Holding a gym for a certain length of time will start to get you prizes. I have never ever had a Pokemon hold a gym long enough to earn any of those prizes I have. I have claimed a couple of gyms in my time, but they have not lasted very long. So if a gym is already owned by another team, it'll show up in that team's color. You can battle for control of that gym, and the opponent will be an AI controlled version of whatever Pokemon

the gym owner chose to guard that spot. You will have six Pokemon to try and take the gym, and there can be more than one guard, so you might spend all of your six guys defeating one guard, and then a second guard shows up and wipes you out. You'll still get experience for defeating the first one, but you are kind of stuck. You know you you you won't win the gym. You win the battle, but not

the war. In other words, if you do win the gym, then you designate which of your Pokemon will stay there and guard the spot so that other people can't just take it away. And if you come across a gym that already owned by your team, you can train your monsters. You still have to defeat the one that's in that place, um and maybe even take its place and and beef up the defense of that gem. But uh, you aren't. You aren't resting control for your team. Your team already

has control of that one. Oh and h. Then there are the eggs. Once in a while, you'll find an egg, and you can place an egg in an incubator. You have one incubator automatically that has an unlimited number of uses, and then you can find or buy other incubators that have a limited number. So you can put one egg in an incubator at a time, and eggs will hatch when you hit a specific distance, so that will depend

upon the egg. There are two kilometer eggs, five kilometer eggs, ten kilometer eggs, that kind of thing, and as you walk that distance, you hatch those eggs. So if you have a ten kilometer egg in an incubator, you walk ten kilometers, that egg will hatch hopefully into something thing

really useful. So I'm guessing that I haven't seen any direct confirmation, but to me, it looks like the game relies both on GPS and predometer like accelerometer type stuff and smartphones to figure out how far and how much

you walk. Some people have said that they have placed their phone on a turntable, an old vinyl turntable, and been able to simulate walking by just having the phone spin round and round with Pokemon go open, and it thinks that they're walking and they've hatched eggs that way, I call that cheating. But I've also noticed that if I walk with my phone and I'm not and the app is open but I'm not particularly walking in a way that jostles the phone too much, I often don't

see the distance reflected accurately in the app. It seems like I've walked much further than the app will grant me. I find that if I hold my phone in my hand and I swing my arm while I walk, it ends up being far more accurate. So I think it's both that's both GPS and predomin at least to some extent, to mark how far you've walked, and once you do reach that distance and the egg hatches you're like yay, and then you have to do it all over again,

so you're just gonna keep on walking. Ultimately, the game is supposed to be about exploring the world around you, not that that sucks people from keeping their head down and walking into traffic or into a telephone pole, which I have almost done a couple of times myself. I'm not being super snarky here. I am as guilty, if not more so, as anyone else. One thing I can say, I have never ever looked at my phone while going

across a crosswalk. Whenever I'm crossing a street, I do not look at the phone because I've seen too many near miss accidents and I don't want to be one of them or worse right, So just be safe out there. I mean, the phone tells you, like, if you don't pay attention, you will get eaten by a water dragon. It happens. It's on the screen and when you open

the game. Now, there's some planned expansions that should be coming out over the next few months, maybe further, depending upon how long it takes Niantic to develop the gameplay. One of those expansions are one of those features that should be coming in the future is trading. A big part of earlier Pokemon games was trading trading Pokemon too to beef up your own collection, but that's not part

of Pokemon Go. As of the recording of this episode, Niantick has said that it's a planned future feature, assuming they can find a good way to implement it so that you're not you're not finding a way to game the system or just make the game less enjoyable. A lot of people really like the idea of catching each of the Pokemon, although I can get very frustrating if you've been looking for a specific type and just cannot seem to find it, or whenever you find it, it

gets away. Uh. But some folks are worried that with trading, it would just all the accomplishment would go out the window. That's the fear. I honestly don't know how I feel about it, because this is my first time experiencing anything with Pokemon, and at that right now, I'm not terribly social with it. I am not one of those folks

who goes out with a big group of people. It's just that I happen to have a lot of walking because I don't drive, so I've been playing it as well, just to kind of pass the time while I walk and to make the walk more interesting. But I have not really been socializing with folks. I have battled a couple of folks for a control of a gem. There's one time where some Team Valor folks were fighting a with me while I was trying to take over a Team instinct Jim. That was lovely, but that's about as

close as it got. And even then they were across the street from me, so it didn't get that close. So John Hank also said that there will be new ways to interact with the locations that you visit, so stuff like pocus stops and gems. Right now they have a very specific way that you can interact with them, but he says in the future there will be more ways, including customizable ways. I don't know what that means, uh, And he wasn't really elaborating, he was just saying that

look out for that kind of stuff. Niantic Labs also said that they want to improve the a our nature of the game so that Pokemon will be more naturally incorporated into your real environment. So you hold up your phone, you've got the camera active right now, Pokemon just kind of are superimposed on top of whatever you're pointing them too.

When the future, they would like to use some uh, machine learning and artificial intelligence so that the pokemon can interact in the environment in a way that makes sense, Like they might be walking down the sidewalk or sitting on a park bench, or trying to cross a busy street, could be any of those things, and they want to be able to use augmented reality to enhance that. No telling on when that might happen, or you know, it may be one of those things that is gradually improved

upon and it's hard to define exactly when things changed. Now, you might wonder, how does this app how does this game make money? Where's the angle, where's the money coming from? And the answer to that is micro transactions. This is where you make small purchases within a game. The game itself is free, but if you want to accelerate the development of your character or get certain items without having to visit pocas stops, this is the way you could

do it. And essentially what you do is you spend real money to buy in game currency and use that in game currency to purchase in game items. So let's say you need to replenish your supply of poke balls. You could spend real money to buy coins within the game and then use those coins to buy the poke balls and not have to go to a dozen pocas stops instead. So there you know. It's not it's not a pay to win the way some other games are, but it definitely can help you get an advantage since

you can't actually play against other players. You cannot do a battle between two players as of yet, no telling if that will come out in the future, but you can't do it right now. It might be one of those things where people aren't going to be too up in arms about micro transactions, because why get upset if if your enjoyment of the game isn't dependent upon trying to beat someone else, and they that person can't get

an unfair advantage just by spending more money. Uh, micro transactions make a lot of sense once you get to a point where you do have truly competitive head to head play. If there's an advantage by spending money on items within a game, it breaks the game pretty quickly because people will point out, well, this isn't fair because I don't have enough money to play this game. The way, everyone else is playing it, so I'm always going to be last, and that's not fun. Games don't survive if

they take that model. In my experience, they might survive among a small elite few who will continue to play the game, but everyone else will just get sick of it and leave. Uh So, how much money does Pokemon Go make? Well, we don't really have a full understanding of that. It's not like it's revealed uh and made public information. But according to Techno Buffalo as of August fourth, two thousand and sixteen, and it earned a hundred and

sixty million dollars in revenue. I don't know if that's um if that's like verifiable information, but a hundred sixty million dollars in that short amount of time is pretty impressive. Beyond that, it had boosted the market value of Nintendo briefly to the tune of more than seven billion dollars. However, then Nintendo came out and said, hey, we didn't really have anything to do with Pokemon Go, and then its

market value dropped significantly. But it's interesting that something as simple as an a R smartphone app could have had that significant of an impact on a company's market value. Also, kudos to Nintendo for coming up and saying, hey, um, don't make such big assumptions because that could in the long term hurt our company. It was the responsible thing

to do. Probably not the easiest thing to do when you look at your company and say, wow, we are worth seven billion more dollars today, Um, we need to address that. That probably was not easy. The average usage time for Pokemon Go players, according to Censor Tower, is around twenty six minutes and five seconds per day, which doesn't sound like a lot maybe, but keep in mind that Facebook, which is one of the real time sucks out there, is on average twenty two minutes forty six

seconds of daily use for the average user. So people are using Pokemon Go longer per day than they our Facebook. Uh. That's pretty pretty powerful stuff. I mean, if you are able to show that to an investor, then that is going to get a lot of attention. Uh So a hundred sixty million dollars is nothing to sneeze as, especially when you consider that you know, they raised that twenty million in funding before they started to develop the game. Uh,

not a bad not a bad start at all. So beyond those micro transactions, what kind of impact and beyond the the the brief but impressive inflation of Nintendo's market value, what impact has the game had? A lot? Uh? There there are a ton of users out there. You probably have heard that the the number of daily users quickly outstripped things like Twitter and Tender, very very popular apps. As the game continued to get rolled out across the world,

that number changed even more in Pokemon favor. So it was one of those games that got a lot of people curious, even folks who were completely unfamiliar with Pokemon and I was not. While not completely unfamiliar, I'd put myself more in that category than anything else. Uh, you know that those folks got into the game. I'm I'm proof of it. I had never played any other Pokemon game, but I'm playing Pokemon Go and I'm enjoying it all the way down to the folks who were hardcore Pokemon fans,

They're really into the game too. To some extent, obviously, are individuals different. There may be some hardcore fans who are like I refused to play this game because it is not reflective of the Pokemon I love, perfectly legitimate for that person, I'm not going to argue it, but at any rate, there is a huge, huge amount of Pokemon players out there. That means that while there are some great stories about Pokemon, there's some bad ones too.

On the great you may have heard stories like a police officer coming up and asking why people are gathering in a location, being told about Pokemon, and then downloading the game and joining in. That's a great story. Stories that aren't so great might be that a teenagers playing Pokemon Go and then as they're playing the game, they happened to encounter a dead body. That happened back in

July of twenty sixteen, so not long after the game started. Uh. There was an issue where a teenage lady was playing um Pokemon Go uh around Big Wind River and as what she was playing, she spotted us some something unusual near the river bank and UH that unusual thing ended up being a body. She actually didn't notice it right away,

according to the news reports. She said that she was only paying attention to her phone and where she was walking, didn't even notice the body until she was practically right next to it. Um. She called the police, and the police showed up and then started an investigation into the man's death. Ah, So that was, you know, pretty dramatic,

and I'm I'm guessing a fairly traumatizing event. I don't know how I would have felt about that, but you know, that's that's just one of the negative stories from Pokemon. Another one, which is a little concerning, where that armed muggers were using Pokemon Go in order to find victims. So I mentioned earlier that there are items within Pokemon Go to increase your chances of encountering Pokemon. One of those things is called a lure, and a lure is

something you can associate with a Pocus stop. You can add a lure to a poke a stop, and that poke a Stop will attract more Pokemon monsters for the duration of half an hour. And this is effective for anyone in the game. It's not just the person who set the lure. Anyone in the game can benefit from this. So imagine you're a mugger and there's a Pocus stop that's in a fairly secluded area, maybe an area that

doesn't tend to get a lot of traffic. Maybe it's late at night, and you set a lure to that Poka stop and you start waiting and you wait for people to show up, and then if people show up and there's not a lot of them and they look like they got some cash on them, your mug them and you take their money. I would argue that that is a not the the not a smart move. First of all, coming in crime is never a smart move period.

Crime doesn't pay kids. But I would, knowing the way technology works, if you're using your phone, if you've got a phone, you've got the game on your phone, it's register stirred to you in some way, and then you add a lure. My guess is that on the server side, on Pokemon Go, they could probably figure out who set that lure and thus give police at least a lead

to work with. So if you got mugged at a particular Pokast stop at a particular time, you might be able to work backwards and say, well, at that time, the lure was set by so and so. Let's go and ask so and so some pretty tough questions. So, in other words, it would make way more sense if you're a mugger to find places that already have lures and not set them yourself. Not that you should do that, you totally shouldn't, but don't set lures, You're just gonna

get caught. Wow. I'm not advocating mugging at all. By the way, Honestly, if I were you guys and I was playing Pokemon Go late at night, I would definitely be doing so with a big group of people, because you never know what kind of folks you'll encounter. Yeah, this is an issue though, because you could create this beacon, this literal beacon within the game and lure people to go there, not just Pokemon but actual players. So be aware of your surroundings, be aware of, uh, what is

going on. Don't just take it as a sign that someone has really been nice in that spot. It could be that there are people who are willing to pray upon the less fortunate or the less observant. Ah. I honestly think that this is obviously a rare occurrence, not

something that happens that frequently. But one thing we have seen that has happened fairly frequently is that players have used the game to or have while playing the game, have gone to places that perhaps they shouldn't have, places that maybe have a certain reverence associated with them that is interrupted by bowl staring at phones and trumping all over the place like Arlington National Cemetery or the Holocaust Museum, places that definitely have cultural or historical or both significance

and are important in places that people really should go to and experience, but perhaps not while holding a phone and trying to play a game where they're trying to catch a little rat like creature. Uh. It shows a lack awareness and respect. And it also means that people who are at those places and are trying to either have a meaningful moment or they're soaking it in there just they're there for the site itself, not for a game it is. It can come across at best as

distracting and at worst as being disrespectful. So that has been an issue in multiple places. I think this one that could very easily be solved, and in fact, I've heard about Niantic Labs taking steps on this already. There's a thing you can do called geo fencing. Geo fencing is just when you designate a specific area market with like a set of coordinates, several sets of coordinates, and you define a region and say all right that that

region is just off limits. There are apps that use geo fencing so that the apps will not work within those limits. For example, there are several apps that have schools GEO fenced off, so that if you are on school grounds, the apps won't work because they would otherwise

be either distracting or even potentially harmful towards students. You can use a similar um strategy with Pokemon Go and mark off certain areas is saying all right, anything that is within this region, there are no Pokus stops, and no Pokemon will show up, and maybe even a message will pop up on the phone saying as much so that players don't invade that space and disrupt things that

they shouldn't be. That's something that's entirely possible. And keep in mind again, a lot of these places were created by Ingress players, but when Ingress was Ingress still is a thing, but with Ingress players it was a much

smaller number overall than there are Pokemon Go players. So you might have an occasional Ingress player coming into one of these spaces and perhaps no one notices because it's like one person every couple of weeks maybe, But with Pokemon Go it's hordes of people all the time, and it's a much different story. There have been other stories too, there was a story of a shootout in Las Vegas between some Pokemon Go players and a potential assailant um

some some pretty harry stuff. Really, anything, anytime you have a game that requires people to get into the same physical space as each other, you're gonna have issues. It's not the fault of the game. That's just because people are people. Uh. Sometimes the game can facilitate that sort of stuff in ways that the game creators didn't intend. But again, not really, you can't really call it the fault of the game. That's people leveraging the game to

do things that the game creators didn't intend. Now the question remains, should we expect a rush of augmented reality games. Pokemon Go has been wildly successful from adoption to revenue generation, at least in the short term. Who's to say that this game is gonna have any longevity. We don't know yet. But will we see a ton of a R games come up in the future. My guess is in the short term, yes we are. But here's the problem. Pokemon

is an ideal intellectual property for augmented reality. It is Taylor made for a R. I would argue because it's the Pokemon Go game is a game that already mimics real world hobbies like insect collecting, so it's already similar to something that you would do in reality. If you were playing a game Boy Pokemon game, your character in the game would have to travel around and collect Pokemon. So translating that game element from the game Boy version

to a real world version not that difficult. You're you're still moving around places, physical locations to capture Pokemon. It's a very simple game mechanic too to translate. Think of other games, it's not as easy to translate that into a real world experience. Elevator action, for example, everyone gets mad when I get into the elevators that pot City marketed and I hit all the buttons, But you never know how you're gonna have to work your way through

the maze. That doesn't work so well. So certain games like Pokemon our ideal for augmented reality. In fact, again i'd argue Pokemon is pretty much the perfect title for this. Niantic could not have hit upon a better idea. They didn't have to shoehorn the traditional gameplay into a different, but related real world version of the gameplay. It was a perfect translation in the sense of the point where

you're going around collecting things. You could argue that the game is far from perfect, especially since there's such limited gameplay right now between collecting in gym battles. But the collecting part I think they got right honestly, and Pokemon had a huge player base already, right like Ingress did not have the benefit of an pre existing player base. Niantic had to convince people to play Ingress. But while Ingress taps into some pretty traditional science fiction themes, there

wasn't a pre sisting world. It wasn't like they could go to a community and say, hey, you know that game you love, well, now here's an a R version of it. Because it was all new Pokemon, there was

a huge pre existing audience. Not only was there a huge audience that audience when they were kids playing Pokemon for the first time in the nineties, they now are adults with disposed income and smartphones, so they have the money to own the material needed to play Pokemon Go and Niantic Labs could bang on both novelty, the novelty of playing an a R game and nostalgia of this game that people loved when they were kids. Is a double whammy, perfect storm for popularity. It's no shock that

it got so popular so fast. In fact, people who are asking like, how can people be so interested in playing this game? I turned to say, are you are you blind? Not not that you should be interested, but do not understand how popular Pokemon was back in the nineties. That the people who played Pokemon back in the nineties are now older and have smartphones, and it's augmented reality. It's it's a new discipline that people have had very limited exposure to. How could it not be popular? Obviously

it was gonna be popular. I if I had had an opportunity to be on the ground floor of investing in Pokemon Go, I absolutely would have done it, because there was it would have been very hard for it to to mess up. That's not to say that it's going to have longevity, but it would have been hard to mess up the launch unless the game was just completely unplayable, and you could argue that in those first few days where the servers were having so much trouble,

it often was. Now I'm guessing there it's gonna be a lot more games coming out in augmented reality space, but they're going to have a hard time of it, because again, they're not gonna necessary lea be position the way Pokemon Go was. You can come up with an amazing game, there's a phenomenal application of augmented reality, but unless you also have that audience to tap into, it's gonna it means you have to convince people, hey, you want to try this new thing. It's also augmented reality.

It's not based on an i P you love, but it's gonna be an amazing experience that's gonna attract the smaller fan base h or you're gonna end up running into the truck. The danger of having a game that is based on a beloved i P. But people are just gonna say, oh, this is just Pokemon Go, but for Transformers or Lego or some other type of of toy or uh i P. So I think we are going to see a lot more are typically in technology. If we see something as successful, copycats come out of

the woodwork before long. But I don't know that uh any of them are going to have a good chance at real success compared to what Pokemon Go has already had not unless someone comes up with a really innovative, cool, compelling use of augmented reality, and that could happen, but I think we're gonna see a lot more copycats in the near future. Let's find out, shall we. Guys. That is our episode on Pokemon Go. If you have enjoyed this episode and you have your own Pokemon ghost stories,

I want to hear them. If you found something really funny, or you just uh, you notice something unusual about the game, or maybe maybe even you just have your own perspective on augmented reality, let me know. Or if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff or people that I should have on the show, either as a guest to interview or a guest host or an episode, send me a message email is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on

Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is tech stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.