Even with a constantly soaring heat index, I’ve been out and about: phone in hand, eyes glued to the Pokémon Go app, trying to ‘catch ’em all’.
Having spent too much time navigating Orlando in search for Pokéstops, potions, and eggs, I have realised just how deceitful our perception of ‘reality’ can be.
Even though the game is being lauded globally for bringing together strangers, pushing couch potatoes outdoors and enabling people to discover more of their city, the seeming innocence of augmented reality is duplicitous.
Augmented reality — the world Pokémon Go operates in — makes our real world immediately cooler by adding simulated layers to reality. It turns the regular and mundane neighbourhood we have long stopped noticing or become desensitised to, into an exciting, novel and digitally manipulable landscape.
Returning to the state of things as they actually exist, for a moment.
As I stroll the streets of my comfortable Florida neighbourhood, my ‘reality’ unfolds against the backdrop of racism: Trump, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim discourse, police brutality against black Americans.
Enter Pokémon Go — a glaze coating the atrocities we humans are capable of meting out on one another.
Chip away at this augmented, artificial veneer, and remove the superimposed Snorlax, and it is all laid bare: oppression worldwide, murder in the name of religion, irreparable damage to our environment.
As #BlackLivesMatter, protests rage across America sparking violence and death — the weight of conflicts make one want to turn inwards.
Examine: How Pokemon Go got me to explore Karachi when nothing else would
An unreal world of opaque, augmented reality offers one such reprieve.
Gaming allows a player to relax in a safe, enclosed space and take on an obstacle that — although challenging — looks little like the conflicts we face in our realities.
And an in-game failure to succeed (like running out of Pokéballs and missing out on a chance to catch that Poké) doesn’t necessarily translate into a dead-end, like it can in reality.
Unlike life, Pokémon Go — although equipped with sneaky unsuspected components — is ultimately designed to allow its player to achieve success. And it is this ability to escape into success that keeps me going back for more and more.
So, I continue to play; only pausing to do so when the power-hungry app devours my battery, forcing me indoors.
Distorting reality
I am just one example of hundreds of millions of augmented realities occurring around the globe right now. And even though Pokémon Go has been shaping many of our everyday routines, we have to remain cognisant of the power of augmented realities to distort cultural and political meanings of the places we inhabit.
Take, for instance, how augmented reality politicises our experience by controlling what we see and what we don’t. What we see is Apple’s natural language user interface. What we don’t are the sites and locations this interface conveniently leaves out.
Take a look: Syrian children turn to Pokemon Go to ask people to save them
In the United States, a woman’s right to contraception and abortion services is heavily politicised. Try asking Siri, or searching on Maps for anything about birth control, abortion clinics, emergency contraception or even mammograms, and mum’s the word (pun intended).
It has barely been a month since the game’s release. It is already evident that as we chase imaginary animals, we face putting others and ourselves in danger. In a matter of weeks, distraction from the game has led people to crash their cars and mow down trees in their Poké-hunt.
People have been charged with criminal trespassing, and some homeowners have found themselves unwilling participants in the game. Players have wandered onto their property simply because it appears as a Pokéstop on their screens.
Where we are all heroes
For some, like Omari Akil, the author behind the viral Medium essay on how playing Pokémon Go while being black is like a death sentence, the simple act of standing on a street staring into an augmented reality can be a threat to his well-being.
My cousin, Uneeb, is a video-game developer based in Karachi, and is also currently enamoured with Pokémon Go. But despite our shared last name, cultural heritage, and affinity for games, our realities remain worlds apart.
For Uneeb, playing in the streets of Karachi is risky and dangerous. It’s common for bikers to snatch a mobile phone while a person is busy locating a Pokémon. It’s dangerous, he tells me, until about 8pm.
After 8pm, it’s impossible to play. He — like others in the city — does not feel safe to check Pokémon Go openly.
Uneeb’s colleague Asim feels similarly. He lives in Lahore, and even though he finds the security situation there a bit better, he is afraid to go Pokémon hunting late at night.
Yes, despite the heat and safety concerns, he has found fellow gamers in the area; he has joined different Pokémon groups; and he is met with smiles from fellow Pokémon trainers when rushing to a Pokéstop.
Uneeb and Asim are similar in this, but they are still part of a lucky few. Because even though they are inevitably impacted by the specter of terror that overwhelms Pakistanis, at least they get to be men in Pakistan.
A female cousin in Pakistan tells me how she had to rejig the app so she could play on the streets of New York from the confines of her living room in Karachi. It isn’t much fun playing solo (and stationary) a game that is designed to engage with others on the streets. But she says that for a girl, it’s safer than being outside.
Take a look: Child's play — Is video gaming dangerous?
Then, there is the pitfall of artificial, transient security. A friend talks about being ‘boxed into the well to-do part of Lahore’ as an example. There are no problems roaming the neighborhood there, he clarifies, but there are feelings of exasperation.
Hawk-eyed army men glue their gaze on him as he walks, phone in hand, past one of the many police checkpoints that box elite Lahore from the rest of Lahore.
Just last week a Bosnian NGO had to put out a reminder for local players to be aware of and respect signs around locations with suspected unexploded mines — remnants of the Bosnian reality from the 90s when war raged across the Balkans.
Today, we’re at the cusp of augmented reality applications becoming permanent fixtures of the near future.
At such a time, warnings like the one out of Bosnia — reminding us to not be overly casual and superimpose layers on our reality as a means of escapism — are particularly useful.
Much like books and films, games are an art form. And just like books and films, gaming comes with moral arguments of rights or wrong.
Is it okay to escape for an hour or so, from the guns and violence of our reality into a world where problems can be solved with a few finger taps? Where we can be the heroes?
Opponents of gaming seem to think it not. Their arguments offer the “games promote violence” logic or the “gamers are trapped in a childish limbo of immaturity” line of reasoning.
The question is: is game escapism any worse than a two-hour, weapons and violence-packed, testosterone fuelled Hollywood film where only a white, impossibly buff male is the hero?
I know the limitations of gaming. I know our generation’s great need to put our mobiles away, to the real world, if only for a few hours.
But right now, the reality of our world feels like a disease. And the world of augmented reality, as limited as it is, offers a possible antidote.
So yes, I — like many others — am using a frivolous hobby to escape. But it’s only because I know that when I turn away from the screen and to reality, every single problem will be right where I left it.