If you haven’t heard of Pokémon GO by now, you probably haven’t ventured outside recently.
If you’re out in public this weekend, you’ll notice a sizeable crowd with their heads down, buried in their phones, hunting for animated creatures in an augmented reality-based mobile game.
Truth be told, even one or two members of the Connect team have been searching furiously for a Squirtle. We love a challenge, and it would be rude not to try and “catch ’em all”.
On the surface, it’s just a fun, throwaway game, but the app has produced some seriously impressive results, and it’s only just over a week since it launched in select regions:
According to Sensor Tower’s ‘Store Intelligence’, GO users are currently spending over 33 minutes per day playing the game, compared to Facebook’s 22 minutes, Twitter’s 17 and Snapchat’s 18 minutes.
During the initial roll-out, SurveyMonkey reported that GO achieved a peak of 21m daily active users in the US – easily surpassing Candy Crush and Twitter. As you’d expect the game is currently sitting pretty atop of the ‘Free’ tier on the App and Play Store in the UK, with downloads reaching well into the millions.
Get up and GO
In our hyperconnected world, social proof means everything. Many users won’t even entertain the thought of investing in something unless someone in their social circle has jumped on it first.
With Pokémon GO, social proof is indisputable – when you see people having fun almost everywhere you turn (be honest, we’ve all got friends on Facebook talking the game up), it’s almost impossible not to want to get involved.
Since launching earlier this month, Pokémon GO has been widely-discussed and debated online, with the implications — positive as well as negative being the biggest talking but.
But as a way to look at the world, or to meet and interact with like-minded people, Pokémon GO is great: it’s active and social, and uses technology as a way to enhance, or, at the very least, alter our interaction with the physical world, rather than closing us off from it.
Strangely, people endlessly staring at their phones in public might just end up being the best argument against those who claim that technology is cutting people off from each other.
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