Pokémon Go as distributed imagination

The appeal of Pokémon Go is in large part due to the game’s introduction of locative augmented reality (AR) 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 non-actual actions and characters – from elaborate fantasy worlds spun off in talk and gesture from play with dolls, building blocks or tree stumps and manhole covers (Factor 2004), the fleeting moments of jokes, songs and daydreams (Opie 1993), to intimate relationships with a precious toy or imaginary friend (Winnicott 1974). Over recent decades these processes have been mechanized and monetized by commercial children’s toy and media culture, not least in the transmedia system of Pokémon itself. What can critical attention to imagination and technology in pre- and post-digital play tell us about the hybrid realities of Pokémon Go today