Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The appeal of Pokémon GO is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality to popular media culture, as players’ mobile phones summon virtual creatures and overlay them on the immediate environment. The significance of this novel device (within popular children’s culture at least) is open to question however. The workings of imagination in children’s lives have always populated mundane experience with nonactual actions and characters, and these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s culture over decades, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and postdigital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon GO today?

Keywords

children’s mobile media distributed imagination everyday technoculture postdigital play

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alcock

(2010). Young children’s playfully complex communication: Distributed imagination. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 18(2), 215–228.

Bateson

(2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. (Original work published 1972)

Factor

(2004). Treestumps, manhole covers, and rubbish tins: The invisible playlines of a primary school playground. Childhood, 11(2), 142–154.

Giddings

(2014). Gameworlds: Virtual media and children’s everyday play. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Giddings

(2016). Distributed imagination [Web log message]. Retrieved from http://www.microethology.net/distributed-imagination/

Hutchins

(1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ito

(2011). Mobilizing imagination in everyday play: The case of Japanese media mixes. In Giddings

Lister

(Eds.), The new media & technocultures reader (pp. 491–505). London, UK: Routledge.

Opie

(1993). The people in the playground. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ruckenstein

(2013). Playing Nintendogs: Desire, distributed agency and potentials of presumption. Journal of Consumer Culture, 15(3), 351–370.

10.

Sefton-Green

(2004). Initiation rites: A small boy in a Poke-world. In Tobin

(Ed.), Pikachu’s global adventure: The rise and fall of Pokémon (pp. 141–164). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

11.

Winnicott

D. W.

(1974). Playing and reality. London, UK: Routledge.

Pokémon GO as distributed imagination

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References