The Pokemon Go Phenomenon

Jamie Henthorn is an assistant professor of English and writing center director at Catawba College. She writes about and has published on games, fitness, and geek culture from a cultural rhetoric perspective. Andrew Kulak is a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. He researches and has published on video games and literary theory, online pedagogy, and rhetorical approaches to digital and physical hybridity. Kristopher Purzycki is a dissertator at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an editor of Proceedings of the Annual Computers & Writing Conference and OneShot: A Journal of Critical Play and Games. Stephanie Vie is associate dean of Outreach College at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, with a particular focus on games and social media. Series editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments

Introduction—Not Just Play: Spaces of Contention

(Jamie Henthorn, Andrew Kulak, Kristopher Purzycki and Stephanie Vie)

Part One. How We Play

Gaming Across the Years: Gotta Catch ’Em All Together Wendi Sierra and Ginger Burgoon

Playing Alone, Together: Pokémon Go, Public Mobility and Locational Privacy

Ryan S. Eanes and Claire Y. van den Broek

The World’s Most Popular Fitness App (Jamie Henthorn)

Augmented Reality Design Through Experience Architecture

(Jill Anne Morris)

Part Two. Why We Play

Rhetorical Augmentation: Public Play, Place and Persuasion

in Pokémon Go (Jason Chew Kit Tham and Deondre Smiles)

To Be the Very Best … You Gotta Pay: Motivation, Resources

and Monetizing Frustration (Eric Murnane)

Addiction and the Apocalypse: The Pathology of Pokémon Go (Kristen L. Cole and Alexis Pulos)

PokéStories: On Narrative and the Construction of Augmented

Reality (Cody Mejeur)

Part Three. The Impact of Play Raid Pass: Constitutive Capital Flows for Augmented Reality (Peter Schaefer and Margaret Schwartz)

For Anatopistic Places: Pokémon Go vs. Milwaukee County (Kristopher Purzycki)172

A Tale of Two Screens: Space, Ubiquitous Computing and Locative Gaming (Luiz Adolfo Andrade)

Placemaking Across the ­Digital-Physical Divide: ­Location-Based Mobile Gameplay as a Relay in the Emergence of Singularities (William Heili, Chen Xu and Nicholas Jon Crane)

About the Contributors

Index