Pokémon Go
The overnight global phenomenon Pokémon Go game gave us the feeling that we, at Mimi Berlin, need some education on Massively Multiplayer Online Games: ’cause that’s what the Pokemon Go game is. If you feel that need too; read on. Otherwise just look at the image and have a chuckle.
Mimi’s favorite Pokémon; Pikachu (“Pika” is the onomatopoeia for “flash”. and “chu” is the sound a mouse makes in Japanese. so Pikachu is flash mouse.) This image of a guy dressed up as Pikachu is also going viral, it’s made and posted by ireallycantonese
We love the fact that Pokémon Go is The Rage of today. It shows us that the digital age in which we live is evolving rapidly. We don’t have to be afraid anymore for a complete generation growing up without daylight, as we always thought they would. (actually that’s the same kind of prediction made a couple of centuries ago, when people thought the streets would be filled with piles of horseshit).
The MMOG’s are an incentive to interact with people around the world, in the flesh. Players of the games have to go at so-called portals, which are real world locations, in order to play. (The remnants of Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Sachsenhausen are portals which were removed last year in July 2015)
Okay, back to what MMOG’s are, including some history
There we go;
MMOG ‘s or MMO’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are games that are capable of supporting large numbers of players simultaneously at the same time in a virtual world: players can cooperate and compete with each other on a very large scale.
The first graphical MMOG Air Warrior (by Kesmai) is a major milestone in the creation of the game genre, it appeared in 1986.
Meanwhile, skipping a couple of decades to reach 2001, John Hanke‘s Keyhole, Inc developed Earth Viewer, which emerged later (in 2005) as the mobile application Google Earth/maps. We probably all know this app and if you used it you’ll get a better feeling for how the MMOG’s work.
In November 2012 John Hanke, by this time founder and CEO of Niantic, publishes the MMOG Ingress (Niantic is the developer of Pokémon Go and is the former Keyhole company) The game Ingress won the 18th Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize for Entertainment Division in 2014 and is still a favorite game to many. The newly launched Pokémon Go (2016) has simularities to Ingress but is more simple and can be played if you are a child. We learned that if you play the both you can sort of hack the Pokémon Go portals.
For y’all who don’t know what Pokémon Go is : Read about Pokémon Go here. (in a nutshell; it’s an augmented reality mobile game, (an app) in which you have to go outside and collect animated life-forms: Pokémon)
(knowledge via wikipedia.org / Ingress / image via mashable.com)