I don’t normally post on Wednesdays, but I am driven to write tonight, because something is happening that seems to be an actual phenomenon. Pokemon Go, the locatative game from Niantic, using IP from Nintendo keeps breaking records. It is apparently already the biggest mobile game ever in the US. Not just the biggest locatative game, this game is bigger than Candy Crush.
Long-time readers may remember the post I wrote introducing some research into attitudes to locatative gaming. I’d run an internet survey pushed towards gamers from all around the world. At the time, the biggest locatative game around was Niantic’s Ingress. I’d asked everyone what they knew of a list of different digital games. I’d got about 220 responses. 178 respondents had never even heard of Ingress, which was at the time “taking the world by storm”. A site called Android Headlines said that. Let me tell you AH (I can call you AH can I?), you don’t know storms.
Another post on that same survey concluded “I can’t yet claim from this research, that the world is ready and waiting for locatative games.”
What does that mean for heritage sites? Well, I don’t think it means heritage organisations should rush out their own AR scavenger hunts. But it does mean that people are already using your sites to play games. A few weeks ago, a team member from one of the places I’m currently spending time at for work told me about a security alert. In the middle of the night they went to investigate and found three people who had broken into the gardens. The people explained that they were there to take control of an Ingress portal.
Heritage locations are already, without their knowledge, Ingress portals. They are very likely already “Pokestops” too. This may be a problem for some sites’ spirit of place. Its already being seen as an opportunity. [EDIT: This article on what you can do if you find that your place is a Pokestop is also interesting.] I bet there already many more Pokemon Go players in the UK than there are players of Ingress, and it hasn’t even been released in this country yet.
Its happening. Its big, very big. Heritage Managers, you need to be thinking about this.
The Interpretation Game 
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