Augmented reality is no doubt the future of gaming and it’s very easy to see why. As we open our eyes from the night’s restful sleep and embark upon our day there is an undeniable sameness in a large portion of the world we encounter. The mundane details of what color our room is, how soft our sheets are, stumbling dizzily into the bathroom, even our own face is familiar and not worthy of a moment of remark or reflection. What an augmented reality game does is overlay all the mediocrity with something new and in the case of Pokemon Go, the overlaid content is cartoonish little creatures you, as a participant, must capture in order to battle other participants in a virtual arena.
The premise of the game is remarkably simple considering how quickly it lit the smartphone wielding population on fire. But, this is the first well-designed, well-executed augmented reality game to come on the scene, a game which provides a very real sense of nostalgia for a certain generation who consumed the original incarnations of the Pokemon franchise. Of course once that generation was saturated with the phenomenon, it was only a matter of time before the youth not immediately involved felt left out of something special and joined the party. Pokemon Go is the first big hit in augmented reality, but it certainly won’t be the last and we have to be prepared for what that means. In the following content, I want to identify the obvious pitfalls of augmented reality as well as its potential to shape the future.
There are already reports coming into local news stations describing the dangers of augmented reality and this is due to the fact that the outside world is not nearly as safe as the living room where most games are played. Players are walking into busy streets, falling from steep cliffs, and being robbed of their smartphones all while distracted by the object of the game. Reality is already very complex and often very dangerous. When additional content is being overlaid onto reality we’re challenged by what is basically a new test of natural selection. Only the players who can stay vigilant of their surroundings will save themselves from being embarrassed, injured, or in the most extreme of accidents, killed. This may seem like a dramatization, but we have to keep in mind that this is only the beginning and with the passage of time the overlaid content will become more complex, more involving, more distracting.
Another concern is actually an observation of a very short-sighted report also being described by local news. The game is provoking those with social anxiety and depression to emerge from their solitary homes and interact with the general populous. This may seem like a boon for the overall status of mental health, but this leap is an exercise in ignorance of what mental illness is and what it takes to resolve it. Someone suffering from a condition which keeps them indoors isn’t being cured by the game. They still have that mental illness, but there is obviously solace in clinging to a very simple set of rules to make the outside world more tolerable and as concluded previously, the game is simply the extra content being overlaid and the world is still a difficult place to navigate. If the socially disadvantaged are thrust into the world without the necessary skills to navigate the world, there will be a gradient of conflict as diverse as the spectrum of mental health.
The conflict that I find most insidious is the potential augmented reality has with concern to marketing and advertising. There are already plans to allow businesses to pay to have their location a focal point in the game, provoking players to enter the business where you might be able to purchase game content as an add-on to the products the company is selling. This might not seem like a problem when the company is a nameless hypothetical just looking to widen their advertising strategy, but when the leading company showing interest in this feature is McDonald’s the problem becomes apparent. Large corporations are large because they’ve found a way to take advantage of their consumer base. The object of any large corporation is to use profit to get people addicted to their product, so addicted they feel they have no choice but to come back and contribute more to the profit creating a vicious cycle of dependence. McDonald’s has successfully convinced the American public that what they sell is food, when it most certainly isn’t. If there is anything that needs to be controlled in this country it is the limitless potential of advertising to convince people that they need things that are inherently vapid, superficial, or poisonous. People still have a right to kill themselves slowly with dangerous goods, but they certainly don’t need the prospect of catching more Pokemon to provoke their children to do the same before they have the cognizance to make educated decisions.
As for what positive effect augmented reality might have going forward, the feature from Pokemon Go that immediately springs to mind is the pedometer influencing how well you do in the game. Any game that goads people into getting a little more exercise is fighting the good fight and going forward one can see how this feature might be expanded into something very beneficial. Imagine gyms taking advantage of this flavor of augmented reality, challenging participants to push themselves harder, rewarding them with virtual goods while receiving the reward of health and longevity along the way. The general concept can be applied to eating healthier, to exploring the world in a thoughtful productive way, to contributing to local charities and volunteer opportunities. Of course you could do all of those things without a set of rules from augmented reality games telling you to do them, but if a bit of social technology is what’s necessary to call people to action then so be it.
Augmented reality outside of the context of a game structure is what excites me the most because it offers a way to know more about our environment immediately and help us on the journey through our respective lives. Imagine walking into a botanical garden and being able to identify any species of flora that passes in front of your phone’s camera. Imagine an app that could look at the shelf of books at a local book store and highlight novels recommended based on your history of reading. Imagine walking through a historical American town and being given a wealth of information of literally anything that might have historical significance. If knowledge is your goal in this life, augmented reality will eventually be able to give you more than you could ever dream of.
It will be important in the coming years to identify augmented reality as the next technology, currently innocent in its infancy, but with time used for a host of diversions, some so distracting we may find ourselves distanced from the reality around us, some so informative we may find reality richer and more worth our attentions. The thing to keep in mind is that the evil people of the world will use augmented reality for evil, taking advantage of anyone not paying close enough attention, and good people will use it for good. It will be important to identify the difference and as consumers, as members of a representative democracy, guide the direction this new technology will take us.
