PLAYING AUGMENTED REALITY GAMES ON THE EVE OF A MASS-EXTINCTION
by Storey Clayton
It is nearly twilight and I am stalking a unicorn.
The day before the summer solstice in 2019, Niantic released its third augmented reality game to cellular telephones across the United States and United Kingdom. Building on the same engine and platform behind their smash hit Pokémon Go and its decidedly more obscure predecessor Ingress, the San Francisco-based tech company unveiled Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. In the game, local landmarks are transformed into inns, greenhouses, and fortresses, between which players encounter dark wizards, enchanted artifacts, and fantastic beasts. Each encounter utilizes the phone’s camera, creating an image that superimposes the animated illustration of a howling werewolf or flying broomstick on the real-life background of the player’s lived environment.
Ingress, released in 2013, features two factions (the Enlightened and the Resistance) locked in an eternal struggle for control of territory, bounded by landmarks like plaques, libraries, and museums. While the map of the game reflects real-life society, the augmentation of reality is largely theoretical: no hybrid images of imagination and reality are on offer. Pokémon Go and Wizards Unite, of course, are based on their respective meteorically popular cultural phenomena, enabling players to collect their favorite pocket monsters or magical creatures. Pokémon Go has been downloaded over a billion times since its release in 2016. And Harry Potter is one of the few media to have a larger fan base than Pokémon.
I never got into Pokémon, so I haven’t played Pokémon Go, but I have friends who’ve spent the last three years playing almost every day. One visited me in New Orleans in 2017 and spent the entire trip looking past the gaslamps and balconies of the French Quarter, seeing only Pikachu and Snorlax in their hidden lairs. He thrilled at the Mississippi River bank, not for its awe-inspiring width and majesty, but for its generous offering of aquatic monsters. When we attended an NBA game that evening, he was bewildered that others in the arena stopped playing when the game began. He spent more time looking at his Pokédex than the players we’d paid to watch.
I was fascinated by this commitment to preferring a mixed virtual world to the real one, but perhaps I ought withhold judgment till I go a full day without playing Wizards Unite. I now live in West Virginia, in one of the state’s largest “cities” that would barely make “town” in the average American’s eyes. I first got a FitBit four months before the game’s release, but it’s only the advent of digital rewards for walking around Morgantown that’s made me diligent about hitting my steps every day. Increased physical activity is what sets Niantic’s games apart from most video games, which are notorious for encouraging addicts to sit in the same spot for hours. Not only must one get out into the world to find and capture items, but augmented reality games explicitly reward walking for miles, to hatch eggs or unlock portkeys that offer better rewards.
In Wizards Unite, I’ve chosen the profession of Magizoologist, following the noble path of Newt Scamander and Rubeus Hagrid in the pursuit of understanding and caring for supernatural animals. In its effort to blend reality with the fictious universe of witchcraft and wizardry, the game ensures that types of collectible items reflect the actual surroundings. Thus creatures are more common in parks and woodlands, Hogwarts students are plentiful on the university campus, and somehow dark objects appear to gather around banks. My vocation has led me to adopt a daily walk along Decker’s Creek Trail, an asphalt-paved bike path that hugs an energetic tributary of the mighty Monongahela River, which flows a hundred miles due north to terminate in Pittsburgh. There, I encounter a delightful stream of mythical animals.
I also encounter real animals. Four days ago, I almost tripped over a snake, thin and black, just minutes after fending off a huge blue horned serpent in the game. Cardinals are impossible to miss as they streak scarlet from branch to branch like a misdirected firework. A small flock of Canada geese were encamped on the trail a week ago, its leaders hissing at me menacingly while the smaller fowl retreated to the creek. I see dogs, cats, bugs, birds, and rabbits as I attempt to capture unicorns, centaurs, thestrals, nifflers, and hippogriffs.
The real animals are dying, of course. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Geologists are clamoring to declare this epoch the Anthropocene, to help measure and codify the disproportionate impact of human life on the rest of Earth’s species. Most scientists agree that we are entering Earth’s sixth major mass-extinction event, wherein anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times the normal number of species will expire in a short span. By its end, 50-90% of species will be wiped out. Recent studies have found that wild mammals have been reduced by 83% since the dawn of humans, while nearly half of life in the oceans has been lost in just the last four decades. Hunting, fishing, and climate change have all played significant roles in the impending demise of our evolved ecosystem.
And what are these activities but reflections of the urge to tame our environment? To seek out the beauty of life and the world around us, to capture and harness it for our own purposes? Pokémon’s tagline is gotta catch ’em all. Not some, not a healthy and sustainable amount, but all. It’s a prime directive, a mandate from on high, reflecting the Judeo-Christian God’s blessing that we have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Our utter domination of the natural habitat is holy. The narrative mechanics of Wizards Unite are more arcane: found creatures are returned to their rightful place in the magical world. But the gameplay dynamic for the player is indistinguishable: you see an animal, you subdue it, and you place it in your collection beside all the others. The instinct descends from the same urge that prompts big-game hunters to behead their vanquished quarry and mount their remains on the wall.
Of course, the cartoon critters from Japanime or magical lore don’t really exist. No animals were harmed in the making of this app. The illustrated renditions all build on or reference real beasts, be they mash-ups of real-life fauna or tricked-out versions of the genuine article. A salamander with a fire-infused tail. A one-horned rhino that injects explosive fluid by goring its victims. A horse with wings. These animals are all unbelievable to the educated eye: not only do they not exist, but we know they are truly fantastic. A fantasy.
Then again, this same conviction helps fundamentalist evangelicals to doubt the prior existence of dinosaurs. What animal could possibly be that large, that vicious, and now they want me to believe they had feathers? Can you imagine explaining elephants to your great-grandchild decades after the last one died? By the time you get through the prehensile trunk, the ten-foot tusks, and the ears the size of trampolines, you will have lost all credibility. Or how about some seagoing examples: the bespeckled gargantuan whale shark, the shapeshifting and color-changing cuttlefish, the vibrant and ruthless mantis shrimp? Good luck.
And so as I wander the wooded paths of West Virginia against a soundtrack of mysterious music overlaid atop the rush of rock-strewn water, I wonder: what augmented reality will my children’s children navigate? Will they turn corners past self-driving cars to discover the digitized image of a hippopotamus? Will they jog past hydroponic fields to capture a virtual eagle? Will they enjoy a day at the beach beside the dead empty ocean, lazily collecting electronic imprints of jellyfish and sea stars? Is Niantic already preparing for the worst, a focus group planning the 2050 release of Ex-Animals of Earth?
Something like this game has already been foreseen. While J.K. Rowling is the most popular writer of my lifetime, Margaret Atwood is our surest prophet. And while the Trump administration has ignited a new era of appreciation for The Handmaid’s Tale, to which Atwood is now penning a sequel, I slightly prefer her MaddAddam trilogy that opens with 2003’s Oryx and Crake. The novel offers glimpses both pre- and post-apocalyptic, though the pre-catastrophe world is still notably dystopian. Therein, friends Jimmy (“Snowman”) and Glenn (“Crake”) make connections on a dark-web game called Extinctathon. It’s essentially a trivia game requiring players to memorize detailed facts about former animals who’ve since died out. Each player even takes on a specific ex-animal persona which helps hide the increasingly illicit activities their gameplay inspires.
If the worst of the predictions come true, scant numbers of our own species may survive to see the demise of most animals, much less to code a false reality over the top of what remains of Earth. Some serious scientists have started to prognosticate the decline and fall of human life by 2050, the year I would turn 70 were I still around. I wonder sometimes whether they’ve turned up the heat on these predictions to urge action on a calamity that seems both dire and inevitable. Then I see news of multiple thousand-year floods hitting the same town in back-to-back years and wonder if they haven’t, in fact, been too cautious.
Is playing a game, on a phone reliant on continual recharging from a grid still built on the combustion of fossil fuels, accelerating this doom? Am I, in partnership with Niantic and the tens of friends who eagerly posted their Wizards Unite friendship code on social media on the solstice, helping use escapism to make the actual reality worse? Could we be compared to a heroin addict for whom real life has become so intolerable that it is only made worse by every soothing hit of the distracting and all-consuming drug? After all, opioid overdose is a leading and escalating cause of death in West Virginia.
I was late coming home last night, so wrapped up in my virtual menagerie that I risked not making it off the trail by dark. Like any path traversed by heroic adventurers, the Decker’s Creek Trail is sunny and inviting during daytime, but scary and vulnerable at night. Dusk, however, is a magical hour, the dappling shadows of overhead trees casting a murky patina over the bikers and dog-walkers below.
Not quite alarmed at the setting sun, but definitely starting to hurry, I turned around a bend in the path and confronted the most heavily shaded portion of trail. The thirty feet before me were entirely enclosed by trees and shrubbery, almost pitch in the sunset gloom. I held my breath as I prepared to enter, knowing the path was still sufficiently populated that I faced no real danger.
Then I saw the fireflies.
There were dozens, flashing in syncopation, three here, five there, never in the same place twice. As the primary light source in the scene, the green bulbs offered brief glimpses of the surrounding flora, itself mostly darker green. I nestled my phone in my pocket and leaned back on a heel to watch the show. The sound of crickets and flowing water and evening birdsong crept up through John Williams’ soaring score. I removed my headphones to listen.
No one would ever believe this, I thought. There will be a time when I will want to explain that the world contained insects who communicated with each other by flashing bioluminescent signals from their hindquarters. And in the summer, at twilight, they emerged to dance and play against a backdrop of wondrous greenery, to entertain and inspire us with a sense of the wondrous possibility of life.
Then, I walked forward through the floating bugs. I put my headset back on and dug the phone from my pocket. I returned to my unicorns.
Storey Clayton is a current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at West Virginia University. He’s worked as a youth counselor, debate coach, strategic analyst, development director, rideshare driver, and poker player. In the past year, his nonfiction has appeared or been accepted in over a dozen literary journals, including Pleiades, Mud Season Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Barely South Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. You can learn more about Storey at his personal website, The Blue Pyramid (bluepyramid.org).
