In July 2016, Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo launched Pokemon Go, an augmented reality (AR) game that uses GPS-enabled mobile devices to overlay a layer of reality in which players can locate, capture and train creatures from the popular franchise in real-world locations. The game was a huge success and became the most downloaded application in the United States within a week, so much so that the European release was postponed for a few days to increase server capacity.
So far it all seems like fun and games. However, Niantic, the developer of the game's technology, had been founded by John Hanke, who in 1999 had founded a satellite mapping company called Keyhole that had originally been funded by the CIA, and which Google acquired a couple of years later to develop Google Earth. Hanke, long familiar with the precepts of surveillance capitalism, created Pokemon Go not just as a game but as a huge experiment in behavioral engineering that would allow him to generate “continuous sources of behavioral surplus; and providing fresh data to elaborate the mapping of interior, exterior, public, and private spaces.”1 In short, a planet-sized tele-stimulation laboratory designed to manipulate and alter human behavior on a large scale under the façade of a game.
True to the surveillance model, Pokemon Go’s app was free, so where did the profits come from? Once again, users were the raw material that was compiled by the application and included geographic data, demographic profiles, and audio “fingerprints” obtained through the microphone of the user’s devices (incidentally, all this information is unnecessary for the operation of the game but not for the economic scheme). This data was processed and converted into behavioral predictions that were used to create a marketplace of sponsors that in many cases served as venues for players and were charged with an entirely digital formula: a cost-per-visit fee similar to the cost-per-click that Google used for online advertising. Niantic signed a deal with MacDonald's to “herd” players to 30,000 locations in Japan. Starbucks and Sprint quickly followed. With this “gamification” Niantic and Nintendo achieved a new milestone in manipulating “human herds.” Not only did they manage to successfully direct and control human behavior, but they achieved a fusion of the physical and digital that will surely to set the standard for new data-hunting and behavior engineering projects.
How casual is it that as we are robbed of will and the world becomes a virtual paradeisos, we are also infantilized? (1.16, 3.3.3, 6.13, 6.18).
- Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 312 ↩︎
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