Augmented Reality: Pokémon GO Is Only the Beginning | Virginia Heffernan | Big Think

Pokémon Go has suffused my life. I'm the mother of two fairly young children, 11 and seven almost, and they both took to it so quickly. And one of the features of any service or game that swamps our minds is that feeling that you've almost been waiting for it.

Sometimes I think about Geriatric 1929, an early user of YouTube, who said when he first saw YouTube he had been an RAF pilot. He's a pensioner in England. He had lived in a state of depression having lost his wife, remembering his heyday using radar and sonar during the war. And when YouTube first appeared, it was like, where have you been all my life? This is what I want to do. I want to be able to communicate with huge numbers of people through the ether.

That doesn't appeal to everyone, but it appealed to many of us when we saw YouTube for the first time. The same thing happened with Pokémon Go. You looked at it, and we've been on the brink of playing with what augmented reality might be for a long time, looking at our phones, looking at maps, and juxtaposing that with real life and toggling between an experience of looking at screens and looking at real life. Sometimes one is more compelling, and sometimes the other is more compelling.

Pokémon Go, in juxtaposing its little creatures onto the world, it's almost as though, it is as though we've been almost training for this in our dreams. The onboarding for Pokémon Go is so simple. There's so little to learn. At the same time I was learning that I was trying to play Magic the Gathering for the card game, and there was so much friction in my learning it. I knew that I would be part of a unique cadre if I learned it, and it's very complicated and esoteric, but I just kept getting thrown off the experience.

Pokémon Go, like other great services on the Internet, you're in before you know it, and you're in with a lot of people. There's nothing elite about it. And I'm not sure I think that it's a social good, it may be, and you never know – when I argue that the Internet is a work of art, I don't argue that it's like good for our health, I don't argue if it's good for society, good for one of the parties or another, good for America, good for globalism. I argue that it's art, and art leads us to places, it changes us, and asks for a willingness to be changed.

And certainly, kids and others that are venturing out into the world, sometimes at night in strange parts - I was just in Massachusetts. I saw a plaque I had never seen before, the usual stories. But when people venture into that wide boundary outside the narrow confines of where you're kept in a safe spot with other apps, Angry Birds say, you are going to take risks.

Art asks us to take risks, literally asks to move us from one place to the other exactly the way Pokémon Go has been moving us all over the world, wherever it's released or wherever they're not trying to hack into it, all over the world to new places. And in that way, I think it's a work of art. Whether it's a net gain for civilization remains to be seen.