How I built a social life through gaming

Chaitanya Bhat and Pavan Mitra have been awake since 6 am. On this Gandhi Jayanti, these young men have decided to spend the holiday together. Their other friends will slowly trickle in as the day wears on. 

Bhat and a group of five other boys are all playing Pokémon Go (also called PoGo) in Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park. It is a free game that one can download on their phone.

Like Bhat, my first brush with the game was in 2016, when it arrived in India and immediately went viral. Social media was flooded with images of colourful Pokémon sitting on top of ordinary beds and ordinary dining tables. I was unsure about what the game did, but I distinctly remember watching classmates walk across campus with great purpose. Today, I am a writer and educator.

My curiosity about its enduring popularity, sees me meeting them by the Edward VII statue, where they finally decide to take a break after a long but productive morning of raiding and catching Pokémon. Pokémon or pocket monsters are little creatures players use to defend themselves and their territory. These monsters have been making the rounds in the gaming universe since 1996. Raids, on the other hand, are even more
exciting to a PoGo player than simply catching Pokémon. In a raid, a player must defeat Boss Pokémon who have taken over the team or area. Players are challenged on the strength, type of Pokémon and battle techniques. 

Busy afternoon

At this point, around noon, the park is full of people and Bhat has walked somewhere between 10 and 12 km. Walking a distance like this regularly is no challenge for him anymore; a far cry from who he was before the game introduced physical activity into his life. Wearing a purple Pokémon Go t-shirt and track pants, Bhat is dressed just like the rest of his friends, all in comfortable clothes. I see a wire peeping out of the backpack on his shoulders, connected to the phone in his hand. It’s a power bank that will ensure he can continue playing through the day. A software engineer in his mid-20s, he is currently working as a game developer in a
Hong Kong-based company. He works out of his apartment in J P Nagar, where he lives alone. He is from Dharmasthala, but has been in Bengaluru since 2019, save for a two-year gap during the pandemic. 

He found his first PoGo friend in Ashirwad G, another member of the Cubbon Park community, which comprises members who congregate at the park to play the game. They ran into each other during one of his walks in Lalbagh Botanical Garden, which is roomier than Cubbon, and gives people more space to walk and congregate. But Lalbagh was only the beginning. He went on to discover more such communities in public spaces across the city. In the four years since he’s been a part of Bengaluru’s PoGo community, he is most active across three groups — Lalbagh, Cubbon Park, and a popular mall (which is a useful destination to keep in mind when it’s raining). 

Most people who know of the game remember the all-popular anime or the original Nintendo game from the 1990s. The game in its current format is a coming-together of all these forms of media. It is an Augmented Reality (AR) game developed by the gaming company, Niantic. The company uses Google Maps to create an alternate vision of the real world that is unlike anything non-players have come across. This game takes real world features and applies them to an alternate reality that players can access through their phones and allows gamers to push the limits of their own imagination. The worlds we live in are made to expand with design and coding. 

Bhat begins laughing when he talks about Google Maps. Their interface is too wordy for him, he says. Instead, Pokémon Go’s clean version of Google Maps, dotted with PokéStops and gyms (where players gather to battle Pokémon together), is more user-friendly and allows him to look at the city differently. “When I was new to the city, I would follow the map on PoGo instead of Google Maps. In the evening when I took the bus back, I would check to see if I was going on the right route on the PoGo app instead of opening Maps.” 

This was, of course, at a time when Bhat even used the bus. As he started playing the game more, he began walking the seven kilometres it took to reach his workplace, rather than commute by bus. It allowed him to shed any leftover pandemic-induced laziness and catch Pokémon at the same time. 

Japanese influence

Apart from PoGo, Bhat is a big fan of literature from Japan. He reads manga, watches anime, and Korean and Japanese dramas. For most kids growing up in the late 1990s-early 2000s, the art in Pokémon might not have been known by the term anime, but it was very popular. Capitalising on the same nostalgia, the app is the ideal game for a young individual today seeking some form of companionship, not only in co-players but even in the Pokémon that players can capture. Each Pokémon has a unique personality and special characters. Catching Pokémon induces nostalgia that new games are unable to invoke. It is no accident that Pikachu is a household name. 

Of the 1,025 Pokémon that exist in the Poké-verse, 872 have been introduced into the game. Catching them is only the first step. Each player can choose to build their arsenal depending on the kind of Pokémon they like. There are region-specific monsters, legends, mythicals, and unattainable Pokémon. Moving up in the game takes consistent effort. One is required to play the game with others, to catch as many Pokémon as they can, and win battles.

The game does not simply intend to have the maximum number of users, but each one is expected to move around and explore their neighbourhood. Arjun C Murgan, a PhD scholar in mathematics, pointed out that during the pandemic, the makers updated a feature in the app that allowed players to go on ‘remote raids’, to allow them to stay at home and initiate battles in the game. At the time, a remote raid pass cost 250 PoGo coins, and a regular raid pass that required one to leave their house was more expensive. Now, the pricing is inverted and players are encouraged to get up and get going. 

A study published in The Social Science Journal verifies that the game actively facilitates community building and companionship, especially amongst young men. Gaming, traditionally thought to be an isolating activity, takes on a completely new meaning with technology such as this. Bhat agrees wholeheartedly. He plays the game to meet people, to spend time with friends and others who match his wavelength. He’s come across many others who do the same.  

Battle ground

The boys are back to playing the game, arguing about whether a specific Pokémon is ready for battle or not. They’re all in the same battle, playing with a few people at the end of the park. They know who they are, but not everyone becomes a friend so easily. 

“I am an IT professional,” Bhat says. “Through the game, I am able to meet more people in the field and speak to them about concepts without worrying about competition.” This in-game companionship blossoms into larger friendships. Recently, he took a trip with Mitra and another mutual friend. They intended to play the game, but instead became more focused on visiting the sites and staying in the present. 

The temptations of AR are unlike the temptations of social media. Playing a game like PoGo mindlessly is impossible because of the kind of work it takes. Unlike Instagram or Twitter, where a swipe of your finger changes the kind of information you can see, AR like this encourages the player to work for the information they are accessing. In a world where most of us receive information so easily, AR appears as fresh as a watermelon during a Bengaluru summer. 

Locality-based engagement

In 2023, the makers of the game launched a new app called Campfire, which finally allowed PoGo players to chat with each other and initiate events or meetups. The features are fairly controlled, they maintain a basic level of privacy and allow players to speak to people they know and trust. In other multiplayer games like Minecraft, which are completely online, a chat feature allows people to make friends and build online communities.  

Communities, in PoGo, are based on location and have official and de facto leaders. Players either apply through the game to become a leader officially, or end up coordinating meets out of interest.  

Bengaluru’s Cubbon Park community is the biggest and most active. Most players meet regularly in smaller groups or whenever they are able to. Apart from that, community leaders organise official meet-ups once a month. The most recent one was held in Bengaluru’s Airlines Hotel. The community fund paid for the event and all players gathered to meet, reconnect, and participate in raids and PvPs (player v. player challenges). 

@Pogoblr, the Instagram page that posts announcements about meetups and challenges, is a space that most players use to keep in touch and coordinate for events. While these events might be a way for players to touch base, play is not without competition. Each player has a different set of goals they want to achieve. Winning battles, collecting a specific kind of Pokémon, or simply wanting to be the best. Each player builds his profile over months, and invests in their specific Pokémon and interests. 

Every year, Niantic hosts global Pokémon Go championships that begin at the community level. Players meet for qualifiers and are selected at each level. Last year, Dev Bamb, from Nagpur, ranked 4th in the world championships, making history as the first Indian to achieve such a rank. Bamb was awarded a cash prize of $12,000 — Rs 10.08 lakh approximately. 

Life in Web 3.0 

The app syncs with fitness apps on our phones and tracks physical activity. It tracks the kilometres you’ve walked and the routes you’ve taken. These pathways then become empty of the traffic and road rage that Bengaluru is infamous for, and instead become a newer version of the city that delivers on the promise it makes to its players: fun. 

In 2016, writer Om Malik wrote in the New Yorker that Pokémon Go and AR are part of that section of the Internet that experiments with the limits of physical reality. At the moment, we’re in an era of technology — Web 3.0 — which places the user at the centre of Internet experience. What is the user taking away from the Internet? 

With an interface like this one, the answer to this question becomes rather interesting. 

The alternate Bengaluru in PoGo does not have landmarks like Ulsoor lake, or M G Road. It is instead punctuated with smaller landmarks called PokéStops which are primary locations where one might find Pokémon. PokéStops are places that are usually full of people — malls, departmental stores, parks, and bus stops. The game developers take data from across platforms to zero in on population-dense locations in the city. Last year, the company added lakhs of PokéStops to locations across the country. Most players were immediately pleased. Mitra had stopped playing the game soon after downloading it in 2016. The graphics were outdated, the features were somewhat boring. But now that the game is constantly updating, there’s no reason to stay away. Especially since the compnay is updating features in locations like India which are not included in their primary servers. 

After level 37 in the game, players are allowed to take pictures of PokéStop locations in real time and describe what they are like, to help other players also reach the same place. Wayfarer is another app launched by the makers of PoGo. It allows users to modify the virtual worlds in the Niantic universe. In Pokémon Go, this results in a map of the city with pictures of landmarks — not just historical landmarks, but also those full of people. 

This is perhaps one of the biggest temptations for users: alternate realities, where players are able to exert a certain level of control. Now and then, the game also warns you not to go into unsafe or private locations, constantly urging you to be aware of your surroundings. The distinction between private and public is neatly drawn with a reality like this one. The public belongs to everyone. 

The first PokéStop I came across was a temple in Shanthinagar. Then I began seeing churches and markets, all locations I’ve seen differently in real life but that attain a unique importance in the Poké-life. The interface is collaborative and interactive; a reflection of the people occupying the city. The Edward statue we are around is another such PokéStop that is the backdrop of most community meetups. As we talk, another raid pops up on the app and the group begins to disperse. They’re ready for battle. 

Bhat, Murgan, and Mitra pause to decide what to do next. Having walked six hours already, they’re ready to go for another six, till it’s time for a raid they’re all planning to attend later in the evening. At this point,
Bhat has been working non-stop for the last two weeks. The day he’s planned with his friends is the first break he’s getting in a long time, and he’s going to spend all of it walking. 

When I leave them, they’re deciding on lunch plans. A burger joint or a cafe is the dilemma. One has more plug points.