Pokémon Go

[liv]

So Pokémon Go is basically a terrible game. It's opaque and annoying for beginners, and it ramps up the difficulty in a way that makes the game more annoying, not more challenging as you advance, presumably because it's somewhat clumsily balanced for monetization rather than fun. I liked Ingress better, and that's saying something, because I already found Ingress didn't have much actual gameplay beyond a cool concept.

But it doesn't need to be a good game, because it's an amazing phenomenon. It's just a perfect fit for the zeitgeist, unlike Ingress being launched at a time when smartphone coverage is extensive enough that people other than affluent tech-heads can play. It had a readymade userbase and fandom in the entire generation who loved Pokémon the first time round, which gives it enough of a network effect to make it appealing to old fogeys like me who weren't already fans. And it's the perfect gateway to augmented reality; you walk around in the real world and find cute things. It doesn't really matter what the scoring mechanism is, or that the most of the features and gameplay elements are promised rather than actual, or that that fighting side of the game is grindy and uninteresting. You walk around, you find cute things. Instant reward.

I'm personally somewhat disappointed by a few aspects of Pokémon. Based on my extremely vague cultural knowledge of earlier incarnations of the game, I was expecting trading to be possible as well as just collecting. And when I heard about "evolution" I thought there might be some kind of breeding mechanic, but no, evolving is just a secondary mechanism for powering up. I fairly quickly got to the point where I'm constantly limited for either pokeballs or stardust, which makes the game feel grindy, and I am reluctant to spend real world money on in-game consumables. And most annoyingly of all, the delightful full-AR mode doesn't work on my phone, so I can't "see" any Pokémon in the real world superimposed on my camera images.

Pokémon Go both suffers and benefits from being built on Ingress. Benefits, because there's a ready-made network of locations and it's inherited the aspect of the older game where you get to find new interesting bits of minor public art by playing. Suffers, because the flavours just don't match; in Ingress, the aliens were supposed to be drawn to populated areas and areas of interest, but in Pokémon, it goes against the idea that mons were supposed to appear in more isolated areas away from the major roads and centres. And in practice it means that players have a very uneven experience; playing outside a major urban centre means there's very few resources available and few interesting creatures appear. Ingress kept a list of all the stops I'd visited, and since I like Exploring more than Achieving anyway, I found that really satisfying. Whereas Pokémon only cares about how many different creature types you catch, and has given up on trying to record where you got them from, which for me somewhat defeats the point of the game being set in the real world.

More seriously, Niantic simply don't have the manpower to deal with curating user-submitted game locations. Which means we're stuck with a snapshot of how the augmented reality map looked when they gave up on tackling user submissions for Ingress. A lot of it is out of date, with stops on artworks or institutions that no longer exist. And they never properly fixed issues like game locations inside children's playgrounds where ideally adult gamers shouldn't be encouraged to gather. Even worse, the only places with good gameplay are areas that were highly trafficked in Ingress, which means places that had a population of affluent geeks who were interested in and could afford cutting edge smartphones a few years back. I've seen people arguing that Pokémon Go is racist because stops and spawn points concentrate in white areas and are sparse in ethnically mixed areas, or because some of the gameplay is in places where it's dangerous for people with some skin colour and gender combinations to go. I don't think the game as such is racist, I think the real world is racist and an augmented reality game is reflecting the racist substrate in which gameplay takes place. This is exacerbated by the financial skewing that comes from just inheriting Ingress' infrastructure wholesale.

Similarly, I'm not hugely convinced that the game is ableist; many supposedly public locations are in fact inaccessible to people with mobility limitations, but that's primarily the fault of the disabling built environment, not the fault of the game for existing within that environment. There are some issues with the interface, particularly for visually impaired players and those with poor coordination / motor control, but I'm not sure that Pokémon Go is worse than any other smartphone app in that respect. It's completely reasonable for disabled people to be upset at being excluded from the latest massive craze, but I think the game is getting a lot of attention because it's such a craze, rather than because it's especially bad. I have seen a fair bit of commentary from disabled players who really like the game, particularly people on the autism spectrum who find the collecting mechanic really satisfying, and people with social anxiety and agoraphobia who find that the game's rewards are a good way to help them get out of the house. Doesn't mean it's ok for the game to exclude physically disabled players, of course! But the consensus does seem to be that it's possible to play in a manual or powered wheelchair (I personally haven't tried, I'm just going by what I read on the internet), and the rumour that you could only unlock the ability to play without physically walking by sending Niantic proof of your disability was discredited.

With all those criticisms, I am really enjoying the player community. It's so cool that everybody is playing, all ages, hardcore gamers and people who rarely play video games at all, and everybody's getting excited about it. I love seeing squee posts all over social media, and all the fanworks coming out, and I'm hugely enjoying the pokestop DW community. And it's actually really good to play with friends in person, in many ways better than Ingress. Because several people can catch the same mon, you can point out cool new ones to eachother; I've had a lovely date with jack walking along the river catching water Pokémons. And multiple people on the same team can combine forces to take down an over-powered gym together. I'm absurdly much enjoying playing with my partners' younger kids; they are still excited about catching every little ratata and weedle, and even spinning the stops to get items, and they sometimes play pretend-Pokémon when nobody is willing to hand them a smartphone.

So it's a terrible game, but it's giving me a lot of pleasure, and I hope its success will in fact encourage other developers to release better augmented reality games.

Comments

[kaberett]

(Huh; I'm actually really loving the ghosts of public artworks past.)

(& re disability: it's not so much pokestops, even, that I've seen folk having difficulty with -- it's managing to hatch eggs on a reasonable timescale. I can manage this because (a) London buses move slowly enough to get counted, and (b) my GPS glitches badly enough in-game that I can usually hatch a 2km egg over the course of an evening at home while sat at my desk, but that's... special circumstances.)

[liv]

There definitely is something dear about the ghost Pokestops. But as a game, it's not very satisfying to head for a location on your screen and find that IRL there's nothing there except a patch of grass or an uninteresting housing development. It rather breaks the point of having an augmented reality game, if the game locations don't actually relate to anything in the real world.

The wheelchair thing - when the game was first released there seemed to be the idea that it was somehow detecting whether you were actually walking, and that therefore it was excluding anybody who mobilizes by any other means than conventional physical walking. But it seems now that it only really cares about speed; if you can go slow enough in a wheelchair or a vehicle or whatever, you should (AIUI) be able to hatch eggs. That is a lot less bad than the reports I was initially hearing, though of course it still means that some mobility impaired people can't play, or can't get the full experience.

[kaberett]

That does rather assume leaving the house regularly via means other than motorised transport that has, under most circumstances, to go faster than 10mph - which I mostly can, but I know many people who struggle to in such a way as to hatch eggs on a timescale that isn't frustratingly slow.

(Plus, of course, playing while using a manual chair is a very different beast to playing while walking, because of having one's hands full, but so far my companions various have been very accommodating about stopping, or letting me know if it's a Pokemon I actually care about, or - this weekend - pushing me some of the time, which is a weird experience, but hey.)

I think this is also possibly a difference in how we are playing? In that I don't tend to head for specific pokéstops, in general; I'm picking up stops in places I go anyway, which means I'm having a lot of things I never noticed pointed out to me (which is fab), which is obviously different to making something the target of a walk...

But! I am sorry that you are finding aspects if it frustrating, and glad you are nonetheless enjoying the thing.

[liv]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was quite impressed (especially compared to Ingress, which you couldn't play indoors at all) at how much you can do without leaving the house, at least if you have a pokestop in reach to recharge your pokeballs. Which again comes back to the problem that there's coverage in wealthy urban areas and not so much anywhere else. I think if you relied on fast motorized transport to get out, you might be able to get to places with transport-accessible pokestops and play most of the game that way, but you'd be pretty stuck for hatching eggs. I do really like walking the eggs, it's one of my favourite parts of the game, so I have a lot of sympathy for people who are missing out on it, and I wish it had in fact been better thought through.

I wonder if someone will come up with an AR game that you can still play if you need your hands for transport - I'd be absolutely all over that. Just imagine if you could in fact play AR games in the car, that'd be revolutionary, including for abled people who don't count cars as mobility aids.

The thing with the ghost stops is not that I'm setting off on a walk towards a particular pokestop. It's that when I'm walking around on my normal route, and I see a stop coming up, but there's nothing there IRL, it's not like having something new pointed out to me, it's more like, hey, look over there – oh, never mind, there's nothing to see.

[kaberett]

I wonder if someone will come up with an AR game that you can still play if you need your hands for transport - I'd be absolutely all over that. Just imagine if you could in fact play AR games in the car, that'd be revolutionary, including for abled people who don't count cars as mobility aids.

I'm getting stuck on responding to the rest of this because you seem to be suggesting that it's a good idea for people to play AR games while driving, and I just... no? No. I am really very not on board with the idea that we should make games accessible to people who use manual wheelchairs so that people driving cars can play them.

[liv]

You're absolutely right, I was responding too quickly and implied things I didn't mean to imply. Let me try and rewrite my comment with more words in it.

I did not mean that developers should make features for manual wheelchair users so that (abled) drivers can use the features. Developers should make features for manual wheelchair users just because it's the right thing to do. The end, no further justification needed.

As an additional point to the above, it is still the case that ableist society in general, for basically arbitrary reasons, counts wheelchairs (and certain kinds of motorized ride-on carts) as "mobility aids" and treats them as medicalized and somewhat shameful, or at best a specialized niche market that most companies don't need to care about. While at the same time, cars and other kinds of small motorized vehicles are defined as not aids, even though precisely what they do is extend and improve people's mobility, including the mobility of some drivers who happen to be disabled. Society, and businesses, are massively organized around car drivers, and massively excluding and disabling to wheelchair users and drivers of things that get counted as aids. In my opinion, things ought not to be that way, and that extends to people who are developing augmented reality games. They should be thinking of "needing hands free for mobility" as a completely mainstream thing, which in fact it is, because the majority of people, including most people who wouldn't at all self define as disabled, use their hands for some of their mobility.

Should people play AR games while driving? I can conceive of, but not imagine the details (since I'm not a driver or a game designer) some game that would potentially not be unsafe. I've seen reports of studies that hands-free mobiles are just as bad for driving safety as conventional phones, and if that's the case, then there probably shouldn't be hands-free games either. But it's generally accepted at the moment that using a phone held in your hand while driving is dangerous and unacceptable, but hands-free phones are widely marketed and used. Imagine a voice-activated game. Or one that measured distance and locations visited in the background while driving, and generated game scores based on that, but didn't permit any interaction unless the phone's sensors detected that it was stationary.

I'm circling back to the original complaint that Pokémon Go as currently implemented is inaccessible to people who need motor vehicles to leave the house. I think any game that was playable by disabled people in that situation would also be playable by abled people travelling in vehicles by choice. Whether that includes actual drivers is open to debate. But anyway, "people travelling in vehicles" is a huge market.

Universal design, basically. So many "accessibility" adaptations make life better for everybody, and that's not the reason to adapt things, the reason to adapt things is inclusion. But what I'm pushing back against is the assumption that adapting things is always and only an additional cost which companies and orgs grudgingly accept because they want to be "nice" to disabled customers, rather I want to frame accessibility as generally improving everything.

[green_knight]

I've seen reports of studies that hands-free mobiles are just as bad for driving safety as conventional phones

As a random data point:

For me, it's concentrating on processing voice that makes me completely unsafe to drive with a phone. I've done this exactly once - in an empty carpark at 5mph - and the experience has convinced me to never, ever drive while making a phone call. I have a similar reaction to podcasts and audiobooks - I can listen to talk radio or plays, but monotone readings are too distracting; and the sound quality of those is better than phones.

[cjwatson]

Ingress had the problem that some people could play it indoors: specifically, anyone lucky enough to have a portal within reach of their house or their desk and enough patience to make use of it had a significant advantage, because they could farm it in odd moments throughout the day with very little effort and get lots of extra material. This skewed the larger game as well because people had a disproportionate incentive (and ability) to defend their desk portals to an extent that nobody would otherwise bother with, but there was basically no reasonable way to predict that just from what you could see in the game without a lot of complicated data analysis.

Indeed the game spawned a little cottage industry of hugely complicated analysis tools and operations, both for that and for the business of constructing very large fields. I gather that at high levels there were people who played indirectly by basically running intelligence operations on powerful desktop systems for field agents on their phones and hardly ever actually bothered to go out themselves any more, which is fascinating in the sort of way that something like the history of EVE is interesting even if it was never my thing.

I'm getting the sense, albeit only at second hand, that the most important thing changed between Ingress and PG to mitigate this has been to put more interesting gameplay on the arcs of the graph as well as on the nodes, and maybe also to have fewer things that require very complicated analysis work. Does that sound right or am I completely on the wrong track?

[kaberett]

Side-note, because I cannot answer your substantive question because I've never played Ingress: oh there is definitely complicated analysis work you can do -- see e.g. this spreadsheet for calculating how close to a perfect example of the species any given Pokemon is (and there are more OH THERE ARE MORE) -- but I think it's largely being done on an individual basis and then shared for individual players, rather than leading to any particular group strategy?

[owlfish]

One of my best days yet with Pokemon Go was spent largely on the North Circular in London. I was a passenger and we were stuck in stop-start traffic delays. There were a whole lot of Pokestops along the way, and we were often going slow enough to encounter creatures, if not rack up egg-distance.

[jenett]

My problem with the distance thing is that I do a moderate amount of walking during the day (and about as much as I can manage, health-wise, in a given day) but it's all within a fairly narrow radius (around my library which is mostly tall not wide) except for walking to/from my car.

I can't reliably do longer distances away as explicit walks - it's heavily dependent on the weather and the state of my lungs. (And it being July and August, the weather is a very limiting factor.) I do sometimes walk for exercise, but it's on a treadmill, so again, GPS doesn't do anything.

So the fact the egg hatching depends on (glitchy) GPS rather than a pedometer is really frustrating to me: I'd love something that gives you the option to pick (maybe with limited chances to change it).

I also, on the trip to Texas last week, was really wishing for a 'some method of showing which pokestops you've visited' because there was no point in going exploring for ones that were not right on my route to the things we were doing at the conference, you know?

[liv]

Ooh, that's an interesting thought, let people choose pedometer versus GPS, and not switch often enough to make the game pointless. I think the problem is that the game is not actually set up to encourage exercise, it's set up to encourage having your GPS turned on all the time so that Our Google Overlords can track people's movements better.

And a list of visited stops would improve the game massively for me. I really hate that the journal just says "collected pokeballs", which is totally boring, I want to know where I've been (and where I've caught the creatures, like any real-life twitcher would!)

[goodbyebird]

Breeding and trading will both be added to the game, but yeah, current release is pretty bareboned :/ I really hope they sort the fighting out as well to make things more interesting.

Whereas Pokémon only cares about how many different creature types you catch, and has given up on trying to record where you got them from, which for me somewhat defeats the point of the game being set in the real world.

That's a big regret for me as well. Would have been awesome to have had a map of all the pokestop locations you'd visited. As is - outside of getting double rewards when you visit ten different pokestops in a row - there's just not rewarding to explore.

I also hope the medallions will award character customization options in the future, as is they're completely pointless.

It has been great fun seeing so many different people out and about catching pokemons though, plus it's doing a good job motivating me to just walk a bit further.

[liv]

I could certainly get excited about breeding and trading! I'm a little skeptical about the "will be added" thing; I have a feeling the bubble will burst long before Niantic get round to actually releasing major features. And achievements actually doing something rather than just sitting there would certainly make the game more fun.

The exploring the real world part really worked for me in Ingress and just doesn't so much in Pokémon; I'm almost tempted to go back to Ingress, though it was very data and battery hungry.

I do absolutely love seeing everybody having fun with the game wherever I go!

[kaberett]

I'm really baffled at the idea that just collecting the medals isn't enough in and of itself? This is probably at least partly because I am that kind of completionist autistic, but it seems to me an identical model to Steam achievements, which are very much just a nice value-added thing. (Plus it makes me more cheerful about catching endless Rattata, so!)

[worlds_of_smoke]

Saying "well, if you have a wheelchair, you can play it, so I don't think it's ableist" is problematic, as is saying "Well, people with x, y, and z disabilities find the game helpful, so it must not be ableist". Not everyone who is physically disabled has a wheelchair. I'm not at that point yet myself, so parts of the game are inaccessible to me. I can hatch eggs, but only when I'm being driven to appointments and, even then, I only get credit for the small stretches where the driver is accelerating or decelerating. It takes me forever to hatch eggs. I can't walk around and explore very well, so my access to Pokestops and Pokemon is limited.

Any game that requires physically disabled people to get an assistive device to have the same experience that a physically able person would is ableist. Saying "Well, it's the world that's ableist and Niantic is just stuck dealing with the world as it is" really bothers me for some reason. I think it's because if we expect the world to be less ableist, it's the responsibility of companies that function in this world to actively include disabled people. No company gets a pass just because the world is ableist. That's not how we promote change.

[liv]

This is a highly relevant point, and thank you for articulating it. There were a lot of rumours going around suggesting only people who can readily walk 10 km without aids could play, which would have been massively excluding, or worse, that you could only turn on a rumoured accessible mode by sending Niantic "proof" of disability. It's absolutely true that a game that can be played on wheels isn't fully accessible, but it's a lot better than one that can only be played walking.

I agree that Niantic doesn't get a pass because they're just operating an an ableist world and there's nothing they can do about it. But yelling at Niantic feels like the wrong lever to pull, somehow. I'm ok with the existence of a game about going out and exploring, even in a context where some people can't go out and explore; some games are about very fast reactions or solving complex puzzles or whatever, and some people can't do those things either. I'm not ok with public places excluding some disabled people who might otherwise be able to visit those places, if they were constructed more thoughtfully. I'm not sure what Niantic, specifically, could have done better, other than not making the game in the first place, is where I'm coming from.

[kaberett]

The Sims 4 features basically infinitely-customisable gender options. I consulted on it. They could and did do better, which is a literally game-changing example set for the entire industry; so could Niantic (and Niantic has done not-abjectly-awfully on gender), who have... set the bar for AR games (really very highly, for all it's bare-bones and buggy). Niantic unfucking this would, absolutely, be an effective lever to pull.

[slashmarks]

What changes do you think should have been made to the game?

I'm coming at this from the perspective of a physically disabled person who definitely agrees with liv -- I play less than I would if I was abled, since I can only take walks on some days and a lot of the time I use all of my walking energy up on necessary chores, but I don't think there's anything Niantic can do about the fact that I only sometimes have the energy to go out and explore in order to play a game that is about going out and exploring.

Niantic can't force people to provide more public seating or fix sidewalks so that they're wheelchair accessible or make my friends' doctors give them better pain meds so they have more energy. The barriers here mostly are not within the game design, unless I'm missing something?

[kaberett]

[I am a manual wheelchair user dealing with chronic pain/fatigue/etc, and based in London. I am very on board with the mixed model, like: the tube network not having step-free access is disabling in the social-model sense because it makes a massive difference to how efficiently I can travel, but also being in chronic pain/being chronically severely depressed/etc is just fundamentally shit regardless of what adaptations/accommodations are in place.]

So, for example, lures attract Pokemon to a stationary location for up to 30 minutes at a reasonably high rate. If you have multiple lures in close proximity, i.e. multiple Pokestops in close proximity, the effect seems to be increased beyond simply multiplying.

In contrast, incense -- which is centred on the player, not on a stationary object -- attracts wild Pokemon at a rate of (approximately) one every five minutes OR one every 200m travelled, but no more than one per minute regardless of distance travelled.

So "getting Pokemon to come to your location" rewards being in a densely-populated "high-interest" area (and being able to remain there -- I can't hang out at most high-density Pokestop areas with multiple lures, because people will be smoking) or moving relatively rapidly. That is not a way the game had to be designed.


And then there are eggs, which keep coming up because they're relevant, and some options there would include "reward all distance travelled without putting an upper limit on speed" or "have multiple avenues available to hatch eggs" (e.g. have it reward time spent with the game open and running in addition to time spent with the game open and running and in motion).


Like. There are a lot a lot a lot of options here.

[kaberett]

And I think we're also probably fundamentally in disagreement about the purpose of the game, which probably isn't helping? I don't think the game is about "going out and exploring" -- for me, it's very much about completing my Pokedex, and I really enjoy the augmented reality aspects that mean that I can find Pokemon in the world I'm interacting with -- but I'd like it if that could be finding Pokemon in the world I'm actually interacting with, whatever that looks like.

I enjoy the ghost public art, as I've said, and I'm enjoying having things pointed out to me that I haven't otherwise noticed in my regular haunts -- but that... really isn't what the game is about. For me! It can perfectly well be about that for other people! But I don't think other people prioritising "going out and exploring" has to be mutually exclusive with accessible game design; indeed, one of the things I think Niantic have done really well is porting Pokemon to actually be much more choose-your-own-adventure in the AR context than in was in the Gameboy games. Like, you can basically entirely ignore gyms/fighting if you want to! You can completely ignore eggs if you want to! You can ignore filling out the Pokedex in favour of maxing stats on a small specific handful of Pokemon if you want to (via catching mostly Pidgey and Rattata)! You can work on getting all the badges for specific Pokemon types while ignoring filling out the Pokedex and also the gym/fighting system! I just -- there are so many ways to interact with it, I'm sure I've missed loads of them, and I just... genuinely think they've done a thoroughly good job of it even with, as I say, how buggy and bare-bones it is.

I just also think they could have done a much better job of accessibility.

[naath]

disagreement about the purpose of the game

I think that's probably the heart of the problem. I mean if someone sat down and said "how do we make a game to encourage people to go for long walks" then obviously the result would be accessible only to people who can go for long walks, by the nature of the thing (and lots of activities are only accessible to people who can do the activity involved). But if someone set out to "make a game about collecting things" then tacking on "you have to walk a lot, and go to high traffic public spaces a lot" seems to be just randomly tacking on inaccessibility to something that could in its core idea be much more accessible.

[kaberett]

(Apologies for being wall-of-defensive-words last night; I failed to realise how much I needed to compensate for various stressors and was defaulting to spiky, I think.)

[slashmarks]

No problem -- you didn't come off as spiky to me! I will have to think about what you've said.

Your point about incense and lures is a good one, and that had annoyed me, as well. In general, though, I think what I've read suggests Niantic *does* think of the game as being about "go out and explore," particularly since a lot of it is meant to encourage people to keep their GPS on all the time so Google can keep track of movements.

In general, I agree there are accessibility problems -- but there are accessibility problems in almost all video games, and I think the ones here are a lot more analogous to the fact that I can't really play many RPGs because the few hours of concentration time I can spare every week isn't enough to make story progress in long games and I lose track of what's going on over months, rather than to the website that refuses to put keyboard shortcuts in its grinding games because they might be used to cheat.

The press about Pokemon Go and accessibility strikes me as more -- mm, I don't want to sound like I don't empathize, because I do. But, it seems like the group of people who are exceptionally, specifically mad at *this* game are people who have mainly mobility problems and are used to being able to play video games with no problem, and are being hit with surprise access barriers for the first time. The people I know who game and have, say, hand movement problems or other similar issues that commonly cause issues as well as mobility problems don't seem to think it's worse than your average game (myself included in that).

[silveradept]

It's the beginning of what could be an excellent game. Admittedly, saying "wait fur the next release" is no way of evaluating a game.

It is rather neat to see all the people who are going about attempting to catch mons around, while also getting some yourself. Unlike Ingress, which was supposed to be semi-secret, Go is openly social.

It would have been nice to take a look at availability of stops and pokemon throughout the beta to see where there are bad spots.

Niantic has also not earned lots of points by disapproving of projects like Pokevision, which are meant to be helpful in making decisions on where to go.

[liv]

Yeah, I'm not sure that, having released a relatively bad game, Niantic can keep up momentum long enough to actually upgrade the features. And blocking all the helper apps is really shooting themselves in the foot, insisting people play the boring way will just put players off.

And yes, I do love that the flavour of the game is about everybody being social with the other trainers, and not about being secret agents. It's great that it's popular enough people aren't furtive about it.

[alatefeline]

Exactly! Some of my family and I were discussing this in a coffee shop the other day, and focusing on the ways in which Pokemon Go as a phenomenon is really just the opening wedge of the phenomenon described and predicted as augmented reality / the internet of things.

Its existence highlights, without necessarily *explaining*, a transition in how we use technology that is already in process. (Used Google maps? Photographed your food? Gone looking for nature guide info to explain that plant/animal you're staring at? Hello, nascent augmented reality.) It's not just a gateway, it's a bridge that moves you from one experience to another while also potentially giving a wider view around at the tech-landscape.

We talked about the dark side of it, and wondered how many people were killed walking in the street when newspapers first became broadly available.

I don't actually play it! Because I don't want to invest the time I know I would, right now. But I go along on pokewalks and am very curious about it. My family agree with you that (a) it's a terrible game (b) it's fun anyway.

[switterbeet]

Tangential: where can I find the list of all the Ingress portals I've visited?! That was my biggest complaint about the game, as I was using it as an exploration tool.

[jack]

I'm not sure "terrible" is apt. I may be overgeneralising, but whenever I describe something I do as terrible, I'm generally being defensive, I'm saying, "I know this is flawed/problematic/simplistic but I love it anyway".

Like, "gets boring after you play it for a month" describes MOST games. Sure, I think MMORG-type games are banking on getting a regular addicted customer base. But that doesn't mean the game is bad if they don't.

I *agree* with most of the flaws, it feels like it would be a lot better if they can fix some of the immediate ones (primarily the scanner, and some accessibility issues, and anything too confusing for new players, although I think the really confusing thing was the scanner). And if they can create some more long-term sustainability with some of the other ideas (eg. trading).

I'm in the strange position of defending niantic half the time and condemning them half the time. What I remember from Ingress is that they made unpopular decisions that were mostly sensible (eg. suspending portal submission at least in high-portal-density areas, was unpopular because lots of people had submitted portals, but honestly, more portals didn't make the game much more fun); and they also made decisions that probably bad (things that mostly made the game unfun).