The Lexicon Of Pokemon Go

Throughout the course of these 10 weeks, I recorded my experience regarding the worldwide phenomena, Pokemon GO. Released July 1st, 2016, Pokemon GO is a smartphone game that uses GPS and real-time tracking to allow users to virtually traverse the world of Pokemon, collecting new creatures, items, and real-life interactions along the way. While the game is based on the original game series started in Japan in 1996, making its way to the United States in 1998, the game play is quite different. What was an individual-based game became interactive, not only allowing for, but requiring a certain amount of teamwork in order to play the game well. Because of this completely new way of playing Pokemon, the patterns of players and the norms they follow was started from scratch and solidified in just a number of weeks. The game is still changing as new updates and features continue to be added, so the research is not done, but the journey so far has already been an interesting one. In order to understand the lexicon of Pokemon GO, I will provide the premise of the game, along with the key terms. As the main slogans of the 1998 Pokemon anime states, the whole point of Pokemon is to “catch ‘em all” and to “be the …show more content…
Within the first few days of Pokemon GO, there were over 30 million users world-wide. In Seattle, I saw them everywhere. I saw players of different genders, ethnicities, and ages everywhere I went. Players took time out of their day to walk around parks to play, others played as they waited for their buses, some unfortunately played while driving, and others played with their friends over dinner and drinks. This early on, it felt impossible to discern a pattern amongst the players; there were just too many. However, as time went on, I noticed a change in the trend, and that is when the rich patterns of Pokemon GO play began to