The psychology of Pokémon Go, 8 keys to understand the phenomenon.

Why is Nintendo's new mobile video game having so much success?

Pokémon Go, Niantic and Nintendo's video game for smartphones, has gained unprecedented popularity in the first few days of its launch..

The fever that this video game has generated has served, among other things, to increase the value of Nintendo's shares by more than 25% in just a few days. There are even some stories circulating about curious situations created as a result of this application, such as the one about some night strollers who, after explaining to a policeman that they were playing the game instead of dealing drugs, end up convincing him and making him download Pokémon Go right there and then.

Why is Pokémon Go so popular?

What could be the keys to the video game's commercial success? At the end of the day, Pokémon Go is a fairly simple application: it basically allows us to use augmented reality to explore our surroundings in search of Pokémon that we will only see through our smartphone's camera. It's simple, but judging by the number of downloads of the game, it more than works.

Here I propose some psychological aspects of the Pokémon Go gameplay experience that could be contributing to its success.

1. There are almost no game rules

A good part of Pokémon Go's appeal is that it's hardly a video game at all.. It can be understood as a veneer of augmented reality over the environments we physically walk through, inviting us to wander and explore real areas.

Rather than a game with very specific rules and a storyline to be discovered, it is an experience without too much depth that offers light entertainment. Therefore, we don't have to spend time playing a game without anything else bothering us. Pokémon Go is built on top of our everyday experiences, and playing it requires no more commitment on our part than we are willing to give. In fact, it can be used as if it were an application to force us to stretch our legs during our free time..

2. Low perceived risk

Pokémon Go can be played without paying anything, and this in itself helps to get people to start playing it.. But, in addition, Pokémon Go's proposition is so simple that the chances of us feeling cheated once we have started playing are very low.

There will be no plot twists that ruin the experience, nor will we reach the end of the game without being given the option to continue experimenting, nor will the quality of the environments and challenges decline unexpectedly a few hours after launching the application. By playing the game for half an hour, we can get an idea of whether we like it or not, and being free, the possibility to start playing Pokémon Go is practically risk-free (beyond the accidents we may have if we don't pay attention to what's beyond the screen while walking around). (beyond the accidents we might have if we don't pay attention to what's beyond the screen, while walking around, of course).

3. The claim of the familiar

Clearly It is impossible to explain the success of Pokémon Go without highlighting the value of the Pokémon franchise itself.. The video games, peripherals and merchandising products merchandising products The Pokémon video games, peripherals and merchandising products practically sell themselves, not least because their brand is already known even to many people who have never been interested in this type of entertainment.

If we add to this the fact that the games in the franchise tend to be positively valued, it is quite possible that images and videos (promotional or not) of Pokémon Go attract much more attention than other competing products. First, because because they are familiar to us, they attract our attentionand second, because those memories are more likely to be pleasant than negative.

4. Addiction to collectibles

The invitation to collect things (in this case, Pokémon) is an easy and effective way to extend the durability of video games.. They make us play them more because they place us fully in the logic of the accumulation of elements that can be anticipated: we see other players and characters with better equipment than ours, we imagine how it would be to have those collectibles that we sense but we have not reached, and so on. Since we know that if we continue to make an effort under the gameplay rules we already know we will get all these elements, it is very easy that the idea of continuing to invest time in increasing the chances of winning these "prizes" is very tempting.

On the other hand, using the resource of collectibles inflates the duration of videogames in a somewhat artificial way, because it is a very simple and stereotyped way to generate interest: it is enough to design new objects and attribute certain statistics and properties to them. It doesn't cost as much as, for example, creating original environments with new challenges, or altering the game's plot to make the story more attractive.

So, the added value of these collectibles is the added value of these collectibles is based on creating small temporary peaks of pleasure when a new item is obtained.This makes us associate this pleasure to this type of simple and predictable situations, in a similar way as B. F. Skinner did when teaching his pigeons to play ping-pong. F. Skinner did when teaching his pigeons to play ping-pong. This easy resource is ideal for free to play such as Pokémon Go, as it can be implemented starting from a relatively modest initial budget.

5. Curiosity to see "the other dimension".

Pokémon Go is mechanical and predictable, yes, but it literally invites us to see a version of our own neighborhood and the areas we frequent in which things are different.. 

Moreover, by walking the streets and parks we identify with our lives from Pokémon Go's augmented reality during the game's first few days of release, we are exploring territory that possibly no one else has seen so far. From the local, we feel part of a sort of global party for inaugurating the Pokémon Go version of the planet.

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- Proscojoncio (@Proscojoncio). July 12, 2016.

6. The fever of social

If there is one way to benefit even more from the fact that the video game being sold is being massively consumed, it is by by creating the possibilities for that mass consumption to turn the game into a social experience on a planetary scale.. Pokémon Go makes this possible not only by allowing real players to interact with each other through the game, but also by giving them the opportunity to create curious situations with augmented reality, images that they can share through social networks.

The possibilities are practically endless and, being a smartphone game, the propensity to photograph and share everything that happens to us is very high. All this, moreover, takes the form of a huge viral advertising campaign for this video game, making more people start trying it.making more people start to try it out. Which brings us to the next point.

7. A companion experience

Pokémon Go is not just a social app because it is all the rage on the Internet and social networks. It is also because starting a game alone can make us end up walking around with people we have just met.. 

People go out in gangs to hunt Pokémon, meet in parks, get to know each other at Pokémon Gyms, help each other find the rarest specimens.... It is, for many adults, a return to childhood, not because the items to collect are Pokémon, but because playing with this application is similar to playing as children do when they go out to the parks.

8. Fashion

Part of the appeal of Pokémon Go these days is simply that hundreds of thousands of people have taken to playing it across the globe. From nostalgic millenials who have rediscovered the Pokémon universe they played in the late 1990s to children and teenagers who simply decide to consume one of the few video games that are free to play that have an ambitious advertising campaign behind them, all have reason to be interested in a game that is so simple and shallow that it excludes no one.

All these digital natives have flocked to Pokémon Go and started sharing images across the Internet.. Images that are instantly recognizable as part of the Pokémon franchise and are an advertising claim in themselves. Thus, the desire to start using the game to join this virtual party is transformed into the gasoline of a new fashion.

Extra: Possible therapeutic application

In this Psycogaming article, we explore the possibilities that Pokémon Go could be useful for combating mental disorders such as depression, anxiety and social phobia. Undoubtedly, a promising line and one that would give even more strength to the already revolutionary video game.