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Pokemon Go

Monsters and Maps (both digital and physical)

July 14, 2016 by krisis

Yesterday EV and I visited The Academy of Natural Sciences for the first time together!

A cast of a fossilized skull of a T-Rex at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences.

A T-Rex skull, as shot by EV!

Despite Philly’s bevy of museums, The Academy has always been a sentimental favorite of mine due to its dinosaurs. As an adult, I realize that it represents much more than that as our city’s Science Museum, but as a kid I was less focused on the “science” part and moreso on the part where I could stand next to a full-size T-Rex skeleton. I still get a special thrill every time I visit, although in recent years that been only for trips to the Philly Geek Awards.

The current special exhibit at the museum is called “Dinosaurs Unearthed,” and it gave me one of my first “kids these days!” shaking-of-old-man-cane experiences directly related to parenting EV (because, as they relate to kids in general, I’ve been having those moments since I was six). That’s because this exhibit presents about a half-dozen animatronic dinosaurs at actual scale, and in some cases kids can direct their sounds and movements via a console of light-up buttons.

As an adult whose love for the museum is rooted in seeing fossils, I wasn’t enamored with this brief experience fill with lights and motion. Granted, it was packed with educational content – with more placards to read to EV than appeared with the displays in the rest of the museum. Despite that, I couldn’t help feeling that it was more of a theme park feature than a museum exhibit. Maybe that’s because as an adult I don’t need to see moving dinosaurs to pique my interest in the creatures – I would have probably been more interested in information about the science of how the animalectronics were built!

2016-07-13 14.33.03

A more lifelike adolescent T-Rex, which EV was not eager to spend too much time standing in front of.

Yet, I can’t deny the allure for younger kids who aren’t old enough to appreciate the magnitude of seeing casts of million-year-old bones. Maybe this is just anecdotal, but Unearthed seemed to trend pretty heavily towards toddlers through first or second graders compared to the rest of the museum.

Yesterday also marked a week of living in a world of Pokémon Go. Visiting the Academy also gave me a chance to experience the phenomenon in the city and oh my glam the urban play environment is a totally difference from our barren suburbia (or, apparently, from black neighborhoods, which are measurably underrepresented when it comes to gyms and PokeStops).

I first opened the game during one of EV’s intense dino-button-pushing sessions in the special exhibit (yes, I appreciate the irony) to discover that the Benjamin Franklin Parkway was exploding in a rainbow of gyms and lured PokeStops.

While I didn’t want to spend our time in the museum catching creatures, I was interested to see how many people were doing so given articles about how the National Holocaust Museum was pleading with visitors to refrain from playing out of respect. While there were a few other parents idly playing while kids interacted with exhibits, I never saw a critical mass of gamers. Maybe that’s more about the age-range of kids at this museum or its content.

(It did raise some questions for me about how institutions in the physical world have the right to opt in or out of their participation on digital maps. While a museum like The Academy certainly wouldn’t have the types of objections to play that the Holocaust Museum does, they might have other requests – like making certain exhibits a PokeStop or Gym, or even having certain creature-types spawn in the museum.)

It was when we stepped out onto the street that the app exploded into constant vibrations signaling new encounters. I could barely make it a half block without the chance to capture another critter. We were absolutely besieged with them when we stopped for lunch at Mama’s Vegetarian (another EV first!) and a treat at Shake Shack.

2016-07-13 12.26.45(I sorely miss the food options of working in Center City every day, but not the corresponding money expenditure or caloric intake.)

We eventually made it down to Rittenhouse Square, and it was there that I finally experienced Pokémon Go as a social phenomenon. The park was teeming with obvious trainers orbiting a lured stop in the middle of the park. It was so visible that I felt the need to finally clue EV in to what I have been doing on my phone all week by way of explanation. When EV and I stopped to catch a Horsea in one of the fountains (our first water creature!), folks started chatting us up about where we typically hunt and what sort of creatures we find there.

Despite the allure of digital monsters in the park, I was charmed when EV tugged on my sleeve and demanded not to catch another Pokémon, but to return to The Academy of Natural Sciences to push a few more dinosaur buttons despite being visibly exhausted and in need of a nap. I’m not usually one to accede to every toddler demand, but that was one I was very happy to fulfill.

(I’m sure a facet of that is the fact that we don’t do any electronic button types of toys in our house, but that’s a post for another day.)

Filed Under: memories Tagged With: Academy of Natural Sciences, dinosaurs, parenting, Pokemon, Pokemon Go

Using Pokémon Go for interval training (or, how I went from Couch to 5k in one day)

July 12, 2016 by krisis

pokemon-go-logoI just ran five miles.

The last time I ran five miles was NEVER. The longest run I’ve ever been on (even with a generous definition of “run”) was The Color Run 5k – and that was with Allie as my personal pace car.

The last time I ran 5k was last night.

I had no pace car these past two days – just Pokémon. I return to you accomplished, sore, sweaty, way more knowledgable about Pokémon Go and with four more levels to show for it, but still not much more of a Pokémon fan than I was two nights ago.

How did mobile game I don’t even love get me from couch to 5k in one day, and from 5k to 5 miles the next?

The first step was deciding I was playing – and running – for efficiency. I generally only have an hour to play at night after EV heads to bed if I expect to have time to do anything else before passing out. With limited time to play, I wanted to maximize my level gain and cover a lot of physical ground to try to collect a lot of stuff – both Pokémon and items – since I’m way too weak for my local Pokémon Gyms.

The temptation is to amble constantly so you can engage with each potential encounter or to camp in an area that’s heavily lured. Here are three ways to short-circuit that to turn playing into more consistent exercise: [Read more…] about Using Pokémon Go for interval training (or, how I went from Couch to 5k in one day)

Filed Under: games Tagged With: Fitness, Pokemon, Pokemon Go, running

Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer

July 10, 2016 by krisis

I am lying in the middle of my living room floor, likely creating a puddle of sweat beneath my back, and it’s all because of Pokémon Go.

pokemon-go-logoLet’s back up a few days.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality mobile game that was released last Wednesday across the United States by Niantic Labs (formerly of Google; now an independent company). In it, you run around in the real world while throwing virtual digital balls imaginary fantastical creatures. Oh, and apparently you go to church. A lot.

Okay, okay, I know a little more about Pokémon Go than that, but only through the past few hours of firsthand experience. Honestly, I only understand what Pokémon even are in the vaguest of terms. I was just aging out of spending my money and time on stuff like games, cards, and comics by the middle of the 90s, so I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Pokemon until I met E’s little brother in 2002.

Even then, I only understand it as an execution of several geeky archetypes – characters who collect things, summoning of creatures, opposing elements in a fighting game, and evolving creatures. I have no concept of how any of the games play or the story behind them.

As reports from seemingly every single person I have ever met about their Pokémon Go play experiences began to crop up over the weekend, a familiar urge began to bubble up inside my gut. Yes, it was the special brand of agita created by OCD Godzilla. There were people out there playing a game about collecting things, and if I didn’t start playing it right now I might miss content and experiences that would never be available again.

On the other hand, there is no part of Pokémon Go that particularly interests me – not the IP, nor the augmented reality. Plus, I’m never aimlessly walking around other than with EV, who I categorically prevent from fussing with screens, digital games, and IP other than Marvel’s. (Sorry, I’m weak.)

On the other other hand, “FEAR OF MISSING OUT,” roared OCD Godzilla from his position just below my spleen. [Read more…] about Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer

Filed Under: games Tagged With: OCD Godzilla, Pokemon, Pokemon Go, video games

Design vs Experience (or: when digital maps rule our physical world)

July 9, 2016 by krisis

EV refers to the voice of Google Maps as, “The Map Lady,” and sometimes The Map Lady and I have a disagreement.

Case and point: to get to the zoo from my house, The Map Lady has me turn off of what is effectively the suburban version of Market Street to get onto Chestnut Street – which makes total sense – but then has me turn off of three-laned Chestnut almost a mile before a crucial left turn to return to sluggish one-laned Market.

On those occasions, I turn to EV during a stop at a red light and say, “The map lady is very confused, today.”

A stone walkway into a larger plaza is partially obstructed by a large stone sphere; walkers have worn their own path around it in the nearby grass.

User Design versus User Experience, one of my favorite visual analogies from my time in start-up land. (Walkers have elected to cut through the grass rather than round the corner and walk on the pavers.) Photo by felixphs

Is she really? Computerized directions aren’t about a route that’s seemingly more direct or that has a higher speed limit. They’re taking into account a quantity and quality of factors that never occur to we humans as navigators … or even to the city planners who designed the streets in the first place!

Even though I call her confused, The Map Lady has found ingenious short-cuts to get me around Delaware County, like skipping a long chain of turn-only lights by cutting a three-quarter circle through a neighborhood with stop signs.

This amplifies the typical tension between User Design vs User Experience not only because of the sheer magnitude users, but also because the reality of their actions can transform the landscape itself.

This was exemplified for me by an article last month in Washington Post, “Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who’s winning?” A residential suburban neighborhood suddenly became a busy thoroughfare due to its status as a slightly more-efficient detour to construction than the route that was officially marked. Understandably, home owners who wanted to live in a quiet area aren’t too pleased with the increased traffic and noise.

While commenters castigated the home owners’ sense of entitlement (streets are public, after all), I couldn’t help but sympathize with them. I’ve only once lived on a block I’d consider a “thru-street” that delivered regular traffic from one destination to another. I find the noise distracting to everything I do, from recording to sleeping. When we bought this house, part of the search criteria was to find a street that more or less lead nowhere in an enclosed neighborhood. (Not a development; just a neighborhood that has no single street that starts on one side and continues out the other.)

Yet, during recent construction, SEPTA busses were detoured through the street perpendicular to ours; it was the only north-to-south way to avoid the construction for a mile in either direction. I was aghast – I had never in a million years assumed we’d be living adjacent to a bus route. Luckily, the change lasted on a few days. Had it been longer, I would have been legitimately agitating to move.

I ponder these things as The Map Lady steers me through previously unexplored territory to get to familiar places. She’s doing more than getting me there faster, or annoying another solitude-loving homeowner: she’s changing my use of physical infrastructure.

Is a tiny residential street built to handle occasional traffic able to endure the volume of “a vehicle every two seconds,” as was the case in that WaPo article? Are the driveways designed so that residents may safely exit into “a backup dozens of cars deep”? Should parking rules be changed, permits issued, stop signs turned to lights, or dotted or solid lines added to the road faces? The innards of historical cities like Philadelphia and Boston have long since wrestled with these dilemmas, but computerized mapping has made them relevant to every street in the country.

The rule of digital cartography can have impacts beyond rerouting traffic. Fusion details how a digital mapping company called MaxMind’s act of assigning unplaced IP addresses to the geographic center of the United States made life a nightmare for renters at an isolated Kansas farm. These people made absolute certain their street wouldn’t be mistakenly re-purposed as a thoroughfare when they rented their house, but didn’t plan for the ire of scores of scammed internet users landing on their front lawn – or for their personal information to be shared across the internet in misplaced retaliation.

Alternately, perhaps you live in a converted church and have suddenly discovered you are a Pokemon Gym courtesy of augmented reality game designer Niantic:

Living in an old church means many things. Today it means my house is a Pokémon Go gym. This should be fascinating.

— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 9, 2016

This is what I’m a little leery of. People pulled up, blocking my drive way as they sit on their phones. pic.twitter.com/WpRbilk6g6

— Boon Sheridan (@boonerang) July 10, 2016

In all three of these examples – Waze, MaxMind, and Niantic – the affected residents were none the wiser of their property’s sudden change in status until they began to suffer the deleterious effects of the situation via the behavior of others. Worse, none of the three have an obvious avenue to protest their designation – Waze, by its nature, is crowdsourced and behaving as expected; it took inquiries from Fusion’s writer Kashmir Hill for MaxMind to make a change after a decade of ignorance to the problems they were causing; so far, Niantic offers no publicized process for property owners to opt out of their Pokémon Go mapping.

That is terrifying. The nature of our connected world is allowing private companies to effectively create their own geolocated “watch lists” that may soon begin to affect property values or put lives at risk without even the basic requirement of an appeals process.

Also, note the aspect of privilege associated with these three cases. The Waze neighborhood waged war through the app and were covered by the Washington Post. The Pokémon Church Guy immediately caught on and his good-natured response turned his plight into massive Twitter exposure.

What about the residents of the Kansas farm? They arguably experienced the worst harm, “visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children,” and having their personal details spewed across the internet in a series of doxxings. Until Ms. Hill found them all they got was a sign posted in their yard by the sheriff that said to leave them alone and call him with questions.

I won’t re-invade that shared personal information to find out their personal demographics, but even if they’re a third white male in this example the demographics of their location (and of the property’s owner, and 82 year old woman) combined with the length of their suffering speaks volumes.

Digital cartography is no longer simply describing or annotating our physical world – it’s having a reciprocal impact that is invisible until it’s unavoidable – and, even when it is unavoidable, its true nature is frequently gated by the technological access and savvy of the afflicted.

For me, that begs the question of which geography represents the truth – the one we can experience solely through the physical, tangible world, or the one that is exclusively digitally accessible? As with history, I think the truth will be determined by the victors, and in many cases that won’t be the unsuspecting residents like the people living in one of the houses in this story.

Filed Under: essays Tagged With: cartography, maps, Niantic, Pokemon, Pokemon Go, reality, Washington Post, Waze

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