Mobile entanglements and communitas: the embodied nature of play in Pokémon Go

This phenomenological study opens up the embodied nature of play, adding to the field’s understanding of embodiment as it manifests in a non-standardized (outside formal education) realm of human experience. The location-aware, augmented reality mobile game, Pokémon Go, provided a viable context to consider the ways the game/device, players, play spaces, and even non-players come together in lived, embodied play moments. The authors analyzed lived-experience data from 30 Pokémon Go players to better understand various possibilities for play, specifically how these possibilities were embodied in the lifeworld of players. This paper explicates two salient manifestations of the phenomenon. The first concerns the player-space-technology entanglements, detailing the simultaneous emergence of virtual and real spaces, variant modes of embodied mobility, the way players shaped physical spaces, and the emergence of human–technology relations. The second elaborates on the community that emerged among Pokémon Go players, helping to characterize embodiment as it permeates social and cultural aspects of play. The phenomenological insights explicated here provide explanatory power that has the potential to inform ludology and game studies while further grounding and extending the work of embodied cognitive scientists, possibly contributing to social accounts of embodiment.