Niantic, developer of Pokémon Go, has acquired Seismic Games

https://www.nianticlabs.com/blog/seismicgames/

by tosh • 8 years ago

66 23 8 years ago

tzakrajs• 8 years ago

I am 30 and Pokemon GO is my obsession. I wouldn't get out of the house without it and it's helped me stay in shape better than closing rings ever did.

wincy• 8 years ago

I saw a family of five at my local botanical gardens the other day, all shuffling around like zombies, the dad pushing a stroller with one hand, phone in the other, staring at the screen. I suppose they wouldn’t have been outside at all without Pokémon Go, but it made me feel uncomfortable knowing mentally these people were far away and not at all living the same experience I was.

I met an old friend the other day for board games and he spent more time playing Pokémon Go than actually interacting with me (or the board game). I told him he was being rude and he just laughed like that was absurd.

I don’t know that there’s anything I can do, or anything I SHOULD do. I’m just making an observation of how people playing these AR games is going to increasingly become this strange phenomenon of walking around for cheap dopamine hits, oblivious to the world around you.

no1youknowz3• 8 years ago

I told him he was being rude and he just laughed like that was absurd.

When I meet people for coffee, lunch or whatever. My policy is phone face down and on vibrate. Only if it's an emergency do you pickup and answer.

I tell people respect my time, it's pretty valuable. If you want to occupy your space with someone, at least have the decency to be there at that moment.

Anyone fails to do that, I simply do not spend my time with them. You soon get to find out, who not only respects your time and values theirs. Verses people who don't do both.

mstolpm• 8 years ago

I saw lots of families, singles, pairs and groups yesterday playing Pokemon Go all over the city. Most of them seemed to have a lot of fun. To be honest, they seem to know more details about and get to more places in the city than non-players. And no, they didn't appear like "zombies" not aware their surrounding. They talked to each other, coordinated their efforts and so on. Kids age 6 or 7 had fun as well as 60+ year old.

Maybe you just have not much to talk about with your friend if he is more interested in playing Pokemon Go than a board game with you? Or you are so focussed on seeing Pokemon Go players wasting their time that it just appears to you that they are acting like zombies? Sure, there might be some players that are addicted, but I they are the majority of the Pokemon Go community.

chrisvalleybay2• 8 years ago

Question: why is it that the ‘world around you’ has more intrinsic value than a virtual one?

I find it interesting how we are always doing value judgements based on what we ourselves prefer. In a millennium, if we are still around, I doubt very many will even have a body.

walrus01• 8 years ago

Imagine if Pokemon Go used more than X/Y coordinates and moved into the Z dimension, using the altitude function of having a multi-satellite GPS lock, and put rare pokemon in hard to reach places. There would be an epidemic of unprepared people falling off cliffs and building roofs.

salvar2• 8 years ago

Interesting how you completely read the mental state of these people just by seeing them at the botanical gardens.

SllX• 8 years ago

I met an old friend the other day for board games and he spent more time playing Pokémon Go than actually interacting with me (or the board game). I told him he was being rude and he just laughed like that was absurd.

I've had similar issues with friends, girls, associates, coworkers, just about anyone.

It is a social problem, but there's an easy fix: set your boundaries, communicate them, and make it clear that this isn't acceptable (how you go about phrasing it differs on the person and their relation to you, wing it). If somehow you end up stuck with someone that can't respect your time, then maybe they're not worth your time. Setting a hardline helps me filter out different sorts that would otherwise waste my time, not just now, at this one lunch, but would continue to do so in the future.

I think it's important that as technology advances and becomes more pervasive that basic social courtesies also need to evolve in lockstep. It takes individuals to start addressing this on a case-by-case basis, but I'm optimistic that given enough people putting in enough effort that we'll get closer to the ideal of a civilized society that doesn't just know how to use their technology, but when and where it is appropriate.

watwut• 8 years ago

Or maybe, dad already spent hours pushing stroller, with kid 1 then kid 2 and then kid 3 and he is pushing stroller again through the botanic garden. And the pokemon go is making it less repetitive and boring, but they are all tired today anyway so they don't enjoy that fully anyway.

The old friend is just rude, I agree.

But with families with strollers and multiple kids, walking through that garden is not something special, it is something you do every day and after years of doing that it becomes old. For involved fathers, they spend a lot of time with kids, so each moment is not special anymore and sometimes you are tired and in bad mood and tired of kids, but you still have to take them out.

stevehawk2• 8 years ago

seems weird that Niantic's own "About" page doesn't mention their original AR game

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

Ingress is on the 2012 slide

stevehawk2• 8 years ago

Oh, it is. I'm an idiot.

kaycebasques• 8 years ago

Fun fact, entirely unrelated to this article.

The Niantic was a ship from the California Gold Rush. Sailors were so eager to secure their fortune that they would often abandon ship as soon as they anchored in San Francisco. At one point there were hundreds of abandoned ships floating in the bay. You can see them in this [1] photo from 1851. The Niantic was one of the comparatively lucky ships that got converted into a warehouse and hotel [2]. You can still visit it to this day, at the Maritime Museum in San Francisco [3].

[1] http://www.foundsf.org/images/b/b4/Downtwn1%24yerba-buena-co...

[2] https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I0VV5z4rats/Ws-ns4ikAOI/AAAAAAAAG...

[3] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Niantic_stern_and_...

eecsninja• 8 years ago

This begs the question of what will be the next trivial game by this company that will be hyped as the next quantum leap forward only to fizzle out a few years later while revealing how naive the developers are about the implications of real life social interactions (e.g. crime driven by Pokemon go)

Niantic, developer of Pokémon Go, has acquired Seismic Games

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