Pokemon Go: the next stage of the zombie

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The media are full of headlines "The world has gone crazy with Pokemon Go!" It is believed that everything was the other way around - at first, hysteria began, which then, in the "push-push" mode, pushed the idea of "be controlled by an idiot" to the world's heights.

The more headlines in the media, the more users, the more users, the more headlines in the media. Considering that Google is behind the game and one of its divisions responsible precisely for promising developments (which must be literally forcibly pushed to the market), this assumption is not devoid of sense.

Let us briefly recall the essence of Pokemon GO: somewhere in the real world, a mark is put on the map that there is a virtual Japanese analogue of Cheburashka. You need to find and catch him, then you need to feed and develop him, and in certain places (which are also installed on the real map) points of exchange and battles appear. You can also hatch Pokemon eggs (don't ask what it is. Just don't). There are two innovations in the game: firstly, you need to go to the place with your own legs, and not with the buttons on the keyboard, and secondly, the smartphone's camera broadcasts a picture of the real world, on which the Pokemon is superimposed. Breakthrough.

This is not a zombie apocalypse, these are people looking for a Pokemon at midnight in the center of New York:

In fact, there is nothing particularly new here. Running around with a smartphone turned on and augmented reality a few years ago did not take off from one Korean company that considers itself a market leader (they did not take off a lot of things, which then conquered the market in the implementation of competitors. Because they are boring). And Pokemon are generally practically the same age as the Russian Federation. But it is surprising that now, when young people have to explain who Beavis and Butt-head are, Pokémon are still able to captivate young people, and not even Japanese, but American (including Australian) and European audiences.

However, it was a saying, and a fairy tale was ahead. And this is what it is: all this hysteria, in my opinion, is nothing more than another social experiment on the topic of how to replace real priorities and the real picture of the world in a person's head with virtual ones, to make him no longer in virtual, but in real life follow someone else's instructions. Roughly speaking, how to make a manageable human unit. Google has been working on this for ten years now, and by the looks of it, it is already pretty close to success.

See also: Google - Total Control Technologies

Change in consciousness

Recently, a lot of efforts have been made to replace the real system of values and behavioral assessments, which is laid down in childhood and operates all life, with virtual rules of the game that can be arbitrarily changed.

It all started with the massive distribution of computer games, where for each genre (and sometimes for a separate game) there was its own set of rules for the functioning of the virtual game world and behavior in it, as well as a number of general rules (for example, that there is no death, but there is a system " recovered "). Players united in communities of fans of certain genres or games, and in them they gradually began to follow the rules of their familiar virtual world, and the unique rules of the community, as always happens, took priority over the general rules of life in the big world. For example, within the framework of these rules, one must always be ready to meet a dragon - although where does a dragon come from in our world? In general, the first direction is virtual worlds with their simplified sets of rules that gradually spill out into the real world.

At the same time, the opposite process was going on - the creation of game systems and virtual sets of rules directly within the real world. Here flash mobs and quests come to mind first, creating their own virtual worlds and their own simplified set of virtual rules that must be followed in the real world.

In principle, the good old sects also represent a set of other rules, but there we are talking about life values that are uniform, universal and last a lifetime. In the virtual world, this does not happen: a quest or a flash mob introduces its own rules only for the duration, after its end the magic disappears and you need to return to a boring ordinary life. The same is with computer games, where the player, when moving from one game to another, is forced to completely rebuild his model of behavior - i.e. he gets used to the fact that there are many worlds, and his behavior can and should be arbitrarily rebuilt.

It is not known when this process was noticed and transferred to a controlled phase, but now it is in it.

Pokemon Go is a new stage in which a virtual system with its own rules of behavior spilled out into the real world, and these rules were given priority over the rules of the real world. People staring at smartphones are run over by cars and cause accidents, because virtual rules are of higher priority for them. The already well-known joke about how the gopniks created a point in a quiet corner and robbed those who approached it - from the same opera. Fascinated by virtual rules, a person begins to ignore the rules of the real world, including those that could protect him from danger. Pokemon hunters roam parks and dumpsters, try to break into other people's houses and even police stations. Because in the virtual world it is possible, and its rules take precedence over the rules of the real world. And it's not funny.

Victory of virtuality over reality

Everyone is chasing Pokémon. Someone was kicked out of the museum, someone was so carried away by the search behind the wheel that they crashed into a tree, someone sank into a smartphone too much and he was hit by a car - well, when else were manifestations of idiocy in public considered normal behavior?

The creators of the game present its main advantages as lying in the real world: physical activity due to the fact that you have to chase Pokemon with your feet, the possibility of physical communication at the "collection points", etc. In reality, this argument looks like this: "It's okay, virtual nonsense is even useful for you in the real world, you see!"

The victory of virtual values over realities aggravates the problem, which the author was surprised to first notice in quite offline quests in the real world. In the quest, everyone runs around the monument marked as "point 6", but no one really cares what kind of monument it is. It is just a point on the map with no symbolic meaning. I found a point, took a picture, and walked on.

Therefore, now the remarks that "this is actually a cemetery, and this is a church, these are important things in people's lives" cause sincere surprise to Pokemon hunters: how are they important? The important thing is that the Pokemon is there, under the chandelier. And the cemetery - well, the cemetery, so what? Real values, landmarks and bonds (Skrepa is when all members of society know what a cemetery is, what is there and why people are sad there. And they sympathize with each other.) Were first discredited, but now they are simply ignored. Which Abraham Lincoln? We had a portal here yesterday in Ingress, today a Pokémon exchange point.

And one and the same person will not even remember not even that there is a monument to the victims here, for example, but also that there was a portal here. The rules have changed, the brains have been cleared and reloaded for a new game.

Is it good for someone?

Of course good. The ability to command the masses is now highly valued in the market.

You can't even imagine how wide a fan of possibilities opens up for the authors of an application that simultaneously uses GPS, a smartphone camera, mobile Internet and other subsystems, and at the same time is able to make the user himself and happily stomp wherever this application needs.

The smallest and least interesting area is monetization. A lot of money can be drawn from players, especially those united in communities, where they explain to each other that "well, that's okay". Reluctant to run 10 km? Dollar. If you want to hatch the egg faster - another dollar. Do you want to pay? Well sit there like a fool. The owners of paid drawn tanks will not let you lie.

If you have the opportunity to lead players to certain real places with the help of virtual (i.e. a priori free) beacons, it’s a sin not to use it! In Pokemon, you can (for a small fee) mark the gathering of players in a specific restaurant: pay us a little, and we will catch up to you in the institution a crowd that will buy something from you. The first ones to hurry up will get advantages, but then, when everyone starts paying for the placement of beacons, new infusions will not lead to anything - there will be no more players. But refusal will lead to serious losses. In general, like drugs, smoking or search engine optimization: the first dose is free, and then you have to spend more and more resources to stay at the same level.

And a little conspiracy

Where can we go without conspiracy theories in our difficult times? The beginning of the distribution of the game turned out to be associated with a scandal: it turned out that the version for iOS requires full access to a Google account. However, this was quickly explained by a technical error and in the renewal of the rights they lowered - i.e. there is no more threat from this side. It's a pity.

The main conspiracy theories of old-school conspiracy theorists (who played spies before the technological revolution) are based on the fact that you can put an end to the right place, and naive players will point their smartphones' cameras at it. And then, in the age of the mobile Internet, it’s a matter of technology. They see soldiers looking for Pokémon in the bowels of missile silos and central posts of nuclear submarines. Actually, users quickly wrote fake news that in Saratov a Pokémon hunter was detained at a military facility, and launched it on the Web, just to troll. On the other hand, there are grounds for fears that something is stupidly photographed wrong, but what can I say if the President of Israel is catching Pokemon in his office?

Even our state has suddenly become preoccupied with secrecy issues in the hunt for Pokémon. Nikolai Nikiforov hinted at the possible involvement of the special services in the game, and an anonymous FSB veteran developed this idea in an interview with a news agency: they say, how will officials start playing this game in the workplace, and something wrong gets into the camera? And sometimes the GPS signal is enough.

Here I would like to play a little bit, but it turns out badly. The fact is that even if we exclude the version with the provision of full access to the device, then simply comparing the device identifier and the user identifier (which, for example, serves in the Navy or the Russian Aerospace Forces) already gives a huge amount of useful information. And access to the camera and GPS at the same time is a treasure trove of information.

The information that the founder of Niantic at the beginning of his career worked for the US government in the field of diplomatic relations (in Washington, Myanmar and Indonesia), then at Keyhole Inc (their product after the purchase became known as Google Earth), which worked on grants, adds fuel to the fire. CIA Development Fund. And then he moved to the strategic division of Google, whose active work with the US authorities in strategic areas has long been no secret.

But while the game is being played on the United States, Russian conspiracy theorists can sleep peacefully. Moreover, the conspiracy theory voiced above, if it is a goal, is a secondary one, at least for now. In the future, it may be used for individual players ("look for the Pokemon in your dad's safe!"). Now we are testing and honing different options: how to make huge masses of somewhat inadequately perceiving reality users chase virtual inserts into the real world, completely ignoring its real features.

Main impact direction

Flash mobs, quests, geotargeting, Google, mixed reality … what's in common? The general thing, as already mentioned above, is that time after time people are honing technology: how to introduce a virtual (and easily replaceable) value system into their heads, and then force them to perform certain actions in the real world. People are told from some command center that "it would be nice to go over there and do this."

Pokemon Go in this regard is a new step, because they greatly simplify the process. Flash mobs had to be arranged in advance and spent a lot of effort, coming up with and implementing motivation in the head in each specific case. Quest rules are generally set in advance. Now there is a whole platform that allows you to catch up a herd of orcs in the right place many, many times within the same set of game rules.

In this regard, it is absolutely unimportant what will happen next with Pokemon Go. Technologies have been successfully tested, methods of influencing the brain have been tested, technical means have been tested, control and coordination schemes have been set. Who knows, maybe if the Kiev Maidan happened a year later, the dots "Yanukovych is here! Surround him, don't let him leave!" … And then - everywhere. A harmless game can be turned into a platform for anything at any time.

But the main beauty of Pokemon Go is that it's all there at the same time. It can be a silly game, and a system of monetizing virtual figures with real money, and a platform for civil disobedience actions, and a crowd behavior management system with the introduction of virtual game rules for real actions. By the way, also with the possibility of commercial use. But while this is just a game, any prohibitions and restrictions will look extremely stupid, and then they will be useless. Multifactorialism is the key to success.

In conclusion, I would like to get away from states, global conspiracy theories and methods of manipulating human behavior. And return to the individual and the threats that all these innovations pose for him personally. Pokémon, virtual communities and virtual life have already led to a dire demographic disaster in Japan. And this is just the beginning.

In the Strugatskys' book "Predatory Things of the Century" there is such a drug - fell ill. This is a neurostimulator, the essence of which is that it spurs the imagination, allowing a person to create within himself a bright, juicy inner world full of great adventures, interesting events and amazing feelings.

The world is so bright that living in the real world was just boring. This was the danger for humanity: a person lost all interest in external life and dreamed of only one thing: how to quickly plunge back into the bright virtual world of his dreams and fantasies. With a natural ending: death from exhaustion, since the virtual world is not able to satisfy the real physical needs of the body, and a person became bored to satisfy them - he didn’t want to waste time on food or sleep.

Well, in the days of the Strugatskys, there were no smartphones with augmented reality, so they believed that the only virtual reality came from within. Now we see that it can come from outside in the form of a world already ready and built by professionals. As for the rest, they formulated both the danger and the possible consequences terribly correctly.