Hybrid habitats: Remediating leisure, space and youth through Pokémon Go in India

Abstract

This paper is set within the context of a rapidly urbanizing India with shrinking avenues of physical play and social engagement. The loss of traditional play spaces has redefined leisure activities for youth beyond offline sites into online spaces. These newer leisure engagements including gaming, binge-watching and social media interactions are predominantly virtual and sedentary. This shift, and the restrictions in their physical movements, reduce youth interactions with their social and material environments. Operationalizing Soja’s “Thirdspace,” this paper argues that Pokémon Go generates hybrid habitats at the confluence of leisure, youth, and digital gaming. Through qualitative interviews and co-playing sessions, this study draws from an engagement experience pool spanning 400 h of gameplay with five respondents in the Indian context. It examines how the everyday leisure activities of youth in augmented environments can lead to new spatio-cultural meanings, redefine immediate social environments, and create dynamic possibilities for youth development.

Keywords:

• Youth
• leisure
• digital gaming
• augmented reality
• trialectics
• spatiality

Notes

1 Salen and Zimmerman (2004) examine how sites of play transform and acquire new meanings when the act of play begins. They call this transformed space, the magic circle. The magic during play is the fun and fantastical element of games that separates them from regular activities.

2 Sideloading the Pokémon Go app, i.e., the act of acquiring the installation file for the game from sources other than the repositories from where the application was intended to be disseminated. In India, most of the early play in Pokémon Go was forced and the load of the unintended players on Niantic’s servers was so high that the developers had to geo-block the region (Menon, 2016).

3 The Pokémon animated TV show debuted in India on Cartoon Network in May 2003. Since then, several subsequent seasons of the show have been made available to the Indian youth through a variety of channels like Cartoon Network, Pogo and Hungama TV. Over time the show has been dubbed in languages like Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.

4 Male protagonist from the animated Pokémon show.

5 Female protagonist from the animated Pokémon show.