Could Pokémon GO be considered art? Journalist Virginia Heffernan believes the game bears the hallmarks of great art — exploration, movement (of the soul or the soles), and a call to instinct. Heffernan's book is "Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art" (http://goo.gl/Ertv9O).
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Transcript - Pokémon GO has suffused my life. I'm the mother of two fairly young children, 11 and seven almost and they both took to it so quickly. And one of the features of any service or game that swamps our minds is that feeling that you've almost been waiting for it. Sometimes I think about Geriatric 1929, an early user of YouTube, who said when he first saw YouTube he had been an RAF pilot. He's a pensioner in England. He had lived in a state of depression having lost his wife remembering his heyday using radar and sonar during the war. And when YouTube first appeared it was like where have you been all my life? This is what I want to do. I want to be able to communicate with huge numbers of people through the ether. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but it appealed to many of us when we saw YouTube for the first time.
The same thing happened with Pokémon GO. You looked at it, and we've been on the brink of playing with what augmented reality might be for a long time looking at our phones, looking at maps and juxtaposing that with real life and toggling between an experience of looking at screens and looking at real life. And sometimes one is more compelling and sometimes the other is more compelling. Pokémon GO in juxtaposing its little creatures onto the world, it's almost as though, it is as though we've been like almost training for this in our dreams. The onboarding for Pokémon GO is so simple. There's so little to learn. At the same time I was learning that I was trying to play Magic: the Gathering for the card game and there was so much friction in my learning it. I knew that I would be part of a unique cadre if I learned it, and it's very complicated and esoteric, but I just kept getting thrown off the experience. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/gTmKll.
