Pokémon GO and 'digital labour' in the augmented city

So ... Pokémon GO has been a thing, right?!

The article below was published as an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last week. It's included here with active links for anyone who's interested. It's about the way the game turns play into a kind of 'digital labour', through the collection and monetisation of data about our movements through the urban environment.

I've got a bit more to say about the game ... I really do think it has plenty to teach us about the on-going digitalisation of everyday urban life. More to follow soon.

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As Pokémon GO maintains its place at the top of the app charts, and as our streets and parks are increasingly populated by screen-illuminated trainers trying to find and evolve their digital critters, it’s time to ask a few questions about the kind of ‘play’ that is going on here.

For many, this this game is great fun. And it is free to download. But Niantic (the game’s creator, a spin-off company from Google), Google, Nintendo and others have invested cold hard cash in developing the game and trying to maintain the infrastructure that supports it. A closer look at how the app might provide some return on that investment tells us something important about the nature of ‘free play’ in our digitally-augmented urban playground.

How does Pokémon GO make money for its creator and investors? Of course, as with many free apps, there are ‘in-app purchases’ that will be attractive to some (if not all) players. Some analysts estimate earnings of over $1 million per day from such purchases. These in-app purchases are the most visible form of revenue from the game, but they are by no means the only or even the most lucrative revenue source.

At present, the real-world location of most important places for players like PokéStops and Gyms have been set by Niantic – based on spatial data acquired from another of their augmented reality games, Ingress. In that game, retailers and others can pay Niantic to have portals located in or near their premises. This has now occurred with Pokémon GO in Japan, where McDonalds has become the first company to do a deal with Niantic to sponsor Gym locations. Such deals are expected to occur elsewhere very soon.

But the revenue potential does not stop there. As the saying goes, “surveillance is the business model of the internet”. Augmented reality games like Ingress and Pokémon GO have the potential open up a very lucrative new revenue stream based on the acquisition and sale of data – not just personal data, but aggregated spatial data about urban activity patterns.

There has already been some controversy about the terms of service for players, which give Niantic access to all manner of data on their phones – including email contacts and social media profiles. This data could potentially be sold to third parties with an interest in targeted advertising. Concerns about this arrangement resulted in a modification of those initial terms of service – but this modification has not satisfied the likes of Senator Al Franken in the United States or consumer advocates in Germany, both of whom have raised on-going concerns with Niantic.

But it is not only individually-identifiable personal data that interests Niantic. They are also interested in the spatial data that is generated by Pokémon GO players. As has been widely observed, playing the game rapidly drains phone batteries, because when the game is open your phone is constantly in touch with Niantic servers and providing detailed spatial information about your movements. The Privacy Policy notifies players that locational data will be collected during game play, and that “We may share aggregated information and non-identifying information with third parties for research and analysis, demographic profiling, and other similar purposes”. It goes on to note that “Information that we collect from our users is considered to be a business asset”.

This not only has the potential for surveillance of an individual gamer’s movements through the city (a potential which is of course inherent in smartphones anyway). Aggregated data about players’ movements through the city also has the potential to be incredibly lucrative.

Niantic is now harvesting geospatial data about millions of people’s routes from one place to another, about how far they are prepared to travel as part of game play, about the kinds of places they stop during game play, about the groups they travel with and the connections they make during game play, and much more besides.

The commercial potential of such information is huge. These markets for personal and geospatial data are closely guarded, and notoriously difficult to track by interested observers. While Niantic CEO John Hanke has remained tight-lipped in response to questions about the game’s revenue model, the collection and ‘sharing’ of such data is undoubtedly a core part of the business model of the app.

So, even gamers who never spend a cent on in-app purchases or promotions are effectively producing information that becomes a commodity owned by Niantic. The free distribution of Pokémon GO can be likened to the free distribution of a tool that lets us make stuff that then belongs to someone else.

Of course, this tool happens to be pretty fun to use. But this should not distract us completely from what’s at stake here. Work might be fun. But that doesn’t make it any less a form of labour. And as our everyday urban lives are increasingly commodified in this way, it’s time to start seeking answers to serious questions about how the spoils of our labour (or ‘playbour’) are collected and distributed.

Ingress

Google has created a global near real-time augmented reality game, Ingress, which is played on Android devices.It is a great example of mobile gaming immersed in the player's surrounding environment and the outside world.

Image source: geek.com

In November 2012, a viral game, the Niantic Project, appeared. The project was touted as an Investigation Board filled with cryptic clues and secret codes. The story continues to evolve everyday with clues, secrets and game tech waiting to be found and unlocked. Players are encouraged to form alliances across neighbourhoods, cities and countries.The Niantic Project was revealed to be part of a larger Google project called Ingress, a real-time location-based mobile game which according to Geek.com seems:

to be taking the cues from augmented reality games, puzzle games, geocaching, and team-based online gameplay to make a futuristic game where your phone is the center of everything. Teams of players use live maps to hunt for portals, which show up on the game map to be hacked and captured. Outside of the localized mobile view, there’s a global view on desktops that show the whole team in action across the globe.

The game is invite-only and you can request to play at the games site http://www.ingress.com. The app plays out in the real world and according to Google:

Ingress transforms the real world into the landscape for a global game of mystery, intrigue, and competition.
Our future is at stake. And you must choose a side.
A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us.
“The Enlightened” seek to embrace the power that this energy may bestow upon us.
“The Resistance” struggle to defend, and protect what’s left of our humanity.
Install Ingress and transform your world.
The World is the Game
Move through the real world using your Android device and the Ingress app to discover and tap sources of this mysterious energy. Acquire objects to aid in your quest, deploy tech to capture territory, and ally with other players to advance the cause of the Enlightened or the Resistance.
Strategy
The struggle is being played out globally. Track the progress of players around the world, plan your next steps, and communicate with others using an Intelligence map.  

Earlier this year, Google teamed up with HINT water offering in-game codes invites under the bottle caps allowing the player to choose between the Enlightenment and the Resistance, the games two factions. This provides an alternative option to the current modes of obtaining codes, which is usually either the email reservation system which occasionally emails out invite codes, or by getting the attention of one of the community moderators. Once in the game you can take to the streets to complete the puzzles that offer additional in-game power-ups, or simply look under the caps of HINT water bottles. Then you can get back on the the streets and get playing! As long as you have both an Android phone and invite of course.

The following video summarizes the background to the Niantic Project and its progress through 2012:

Hello Lamp Post

Hello Lamp Post is a project that combines gaming, mobile phones and smart cities through the notion of playful cities. The creation of PAN studio it is the winner of the Bristol's Watershed arts venue's Playable City Award.

According to a recent article in The Guardian the project encourages people to communicate with street furniture including bus stops, post boxes and lamp posts by using the repair numbers found on the objects as SMS codes. Texting this number to a central server "wakes up" the object, and prompts questions via text. The next participant who encounters that object can learn about the previous replies. It is hoped that this will encourage regular conversations with the objects allowing people to learn stories about the hidden lives of the city's population, effectively enabling people to interact with the urban environment in more game-like ways.



PAN co-founder Ben Barker describes how the team devised the project:

The team spent the early months of the project thinking about memory and city, and how we build our own psychogeographies of familiar environments. "Personally I was inspired by Austerlitz, a novel by Seabald in which the city was a walkable version of the protagonists brain. We became obsessed with how we put these memories back in the real world, how do we unite the physicality of the city and the stories we tell about it?
"In all our conversations we were keen to avoid making an application that would limit who could play. Using SMS and the codes on objects we could avoid GPS and make it accessible to all. By making it open to everyone, all players needed was an interest in the stories of others."

For co-developer, Tom Armitage, the project is a way of reclaiming the term "Smart Cities" from major corporations such as IBM and Cisco which increases the reliance on their infrastructure and their idea of the smart city.

"It's exciting to see lots of great thought going on around alternate versions of the Smart City," says Armitage. "And it's thought that really focuses on all the other elements that make up a city - not just its technology. Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica (and formerly Arup and Sitra) has a great recent blogpost on this. The work of New York-based designer Adam Greenfield also explores designing not only for networked cities, but also network citizens.
"There's a long tradition of technology reshaping the city by harnessing its citizens – services like Foursquare or Dodgeball, games like MogiMogi, even cycle hire platforms like Vélib. These all alter and improve the city through technology and people. We're taking some of that DNA and then investing the city with some personality."

The team hopes that by facilitating a different type of interaction with the objects in the city, and a game that does more than require task completion and points accumulation, that users might be able to change their perspective on the city and urban environment.