The digital " lure " : Small businesses and Pokémon GO (original) (raw)

Most of the discussion about Pokémon GO has focused on the end-user and the playful nature of the game. Experts have mentioned the game's commercialism, but they have done so mostly by talking about the data collection practices of the app developers. This commentary piece takes a different approach by examining how businesses have used Pokémon GO's " lures " to attract foot traffic. The main goal of the article is to show how the ludic, digital wayfaring of location-based games can be used by individual places to attract players. While the focus is on business owners, I will also address how game mechanics could also be used to encourage prosocial behaviors such as voting (in noncompulsory voting countries). When Pokémon GO burst onto the scene in the summer of 2016, streets were filled with people walking around and looking at their phones. Rather than examine the ludic consequences of the popularization of Pokémon GO, this commentary goes in a different direction: a discussion of how the hybridity of augmented-reality gaming has specific affordances that can be commercially appealing to small businesses. Particularly, I will focus on how what Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) calls " hybrid spaces " —spaces in which the digital and physical merge through locative media—provide opportunities for businesses to use the digital, location-based objects of Pokémon GO to sell physical goods. Much of the discussion about the commercialization of Pokémon GO has been fairly typical, focusing on the massive amount of data the application collects about users