Cyber-Community Formation through Pokémon Go and the Question of Posthuman Private Spaces in India by Nisarga Bhattacharjee and Ananya Chatterjee

In this paper, at the outset, we argue that, as opposed to the promise of individual freedom that the game uses as a marketing tool, Pokémon Go operates upon a desire to reestablish the humanist idea as a throwback to traditional capitalism. The second part of the paper demonstrates how, even when the reactionary ideology of the game developers attempts a persistent control, the automation of the game results in a deconstruction of Neoliberal Capitalism, and the establishment of the posthuman gamer. Especially from an Indian perspective, the central political conflict in the game is between the humanist idea of freedom and private property versus a posthuman notion of freedom as realized within a cyber collective.
The open-world nature of a virtual augmented game like Pokémon Go gives an impression of unbound freedom to the player by taking the ergodic element of gaming to an extreme. As if replicating Blake’s declaration that “less than / All cannot satisfy / Man” (Blake 2012), it offers a space at once private and universal. (Although Blake here uses the generic humanist term “Man”, his conception of the human subject is much closer to the posthuman paradigm, as exemplified by his opposition to Newtonian rationalism.) The game is a universalization of the ‘possessive individualism’ that, according to C.B. Macpherson, is a bedrock of Liberalism Humanism, since the Enlightenment thinkers considered private property key to the individuation of the human subject. However, this relation between freedom and the ownership of private property proved counterproductive with the advent of Industrial Capitalism, since it actually meant conformity to the bourgeois parameters of private property and the normative idea of the ‘human’. In a striking repetition of the past, Pokémon Go too provides this illusion of agency by assuring conformity, in this case by basically substituting mobility for special autonomy, which the player attains only upon agreeing to the terms and conditions of the game. So, the player is free to move in any direction on the map geographically possible, but he or she is not the actual master of this private space. Anthropocentrism is presented in the game visuals which can be literarily made to revolve around the player’s avatar. But, the number of actions that an avatar can take is limited by the basic orientation of the game.
From this angle, the agency offered by the game is actually reactionary: it makes the gamer seemingly in charge of his or her choices by eliminating all impediments, rather than making it possible for the gamer to negotiate or cope up with those impediments. Unlike the Blakean Eternity, the gamer settles for this fantasy of existential immunity that causes reification, firstly on the cognitive level—Pokémon Go can offer the immersive experience only by boiling down almost all functions of the five senses to the ocular faculty. This gamer should be regarded as anything but a posthuman subject, since, this reification extends to the political dimension and reenacts the colonial desire. In the field of Pokémon Go, all local diversity is eschewed by a uniform logic, and all of the space is left open for the game’s exploitation. Only then does the gamer realize the humanist dream of the absolute autonomy of possessive individualism.
This autonomy is earned at the cost of the effacement of all local particularities and, therefore, any resistance that the subject might have faced in the form of distractions by the others disappears, to the point where the gamer is almost solitary in an open world. It is particularly discomforting to think that the game invites Indian players to reenact this colonial fantasy.

Figure 1
As visible in Figure 1, what the player encounters is an almost vacated simulation of the real world in which the avatar can encounter only in-game content, and not even the avatars of live fellow gamers. The Canadian farm, Ninetic, which has taken the rights for the game from Nintendo, the Japanese owners of the brand Pokémon, seems to have perfectly realized the imperialist desire of eliminating all signs of the other, so that there would remain nothing to challenge the autonomy of the Western rational subject. Gaming technology hereby pushes us not towards a posthuman condition, but towards a transhumanism underlying which is actually an “ultra-humanism” (Ferrando 27).
Especially a player from India may find it disturbing since he or she will encounter none of the local contents on the familiar itineraries, and instead will have to abide by the Western behavioral patterns—such as the choice of attire and language—that the game treats as default. The game does indeed offer in-game friendship opportunities with real players, and also makes bonding with other players necessary on multiple occasions, such as gym raids. Nevertheless, the exploratory part of the game, which is the more fundamental feature of Pokémon Go, is designed thus that the gamer will be facing no intervention from others while exploring and catching pokémon. The only challenges that the player will encounter are parts of the gameplay itself.
Neoliberalism has reworked this traditional colonial desire of the Western subject and taken it to absurd ultra-humanist levels. By initiating what Baudrillard terms a potlatch of baseness (Baudrillard 22), Neoliberal Capitalism invites all cultures to give up everything particular to it, and therefore everything of value, and embrace each other in a shared vacuity. The outcome is a homogeneous playground in which, although local images exist as distinguishable images, they are not characterized by some inexhaustible value without an equivalent, but by the uniformity of exchange-value. So, all iterations of culture can be commodified by the neoliberal human subject without any form of resistance. This logic of universal exchange-value particularly applies for the pokéstops and Gyms of Pokémon Go, since they are based on local spots—like religious architectures, tourist attractions, railway stations, malls, and such other venues that the GPS recognizes—and yet, the uniform rules for pokéstops and gyms apply for all these venues without any variation. Thus, the game eschews local variety.
We call the resultant freedom offered by the game defensive because it does not offer the freedom of the expression of cultural diversity, but instead neutralises all forms of diversity to make the gamer comfortable. The point of this paper is, however, not the expression of the ideal humanist subject by the game, but the fact that, despite all the reasons so far highlighted for it to function as an endorsement of the Humanist and Neoliberal fantasy of traditional Western individualism, Pokémon Go has actually resulted in the composition of posthuman subjects that deconstruct this Neoliberal, Techno-capitalist fantasy. A look at the behaviours of gamers tells us that, instead of settling into the isolated comfort of the individual gaming/colonizing experience, elements of the game actually necessitate reaching out and communicating with others, thus illustrating the inadequacies within the humanist fantasy of freedom and private space. Through the revelation of the basic faults of the traditional models of ontology, the experience of “being-with” proved essential to posthuman ipseity.
Such is the case because, first of all, the game that has transgressed the threshold of human intentionality—whether that of the programmers or that of the gamers—to the point where it now displays an emergent behaviour. In Pokémon Go, we see the inevitable transfer of agency to cybernetic automation rather than any human homo economicus. While the author of any narrative can not only determine the start of a narrative but also the end, a game developer can decide the ground rules of the gaming simulation, after which, however, the outcomes are not in his or her hands. We often hear the expression ‘the story took a life of its own’. But it remains true that in a traditional form narrative this can be the case only metaphorically. In the case of a cybertext, this can happen in a literal sense. The simulation takes on an artificial life, and this non-human agency makes a limited but variable set of the number of outcomes for the game. Thus, even if the simauthor’s fantasy is modelled after the Neoliberal humanist exclusivism and the gamer is drawn in by the same promise, on the final count, a different, posthuman imagination that is more than the sum of the decisions made by the simauthor and the gamer ends up conditioning the behavioral patterns.
This takes the individual participants closer to the posthuman paradigm as they appropriate, keep faith in, and predict, as far as possible, the actions of this invisible hand for greater success in the game. As Sonia Fizek notes, owning to the prevalence of the “non-intelligent or non-human form” (Fizek 206) in games,
The post-human player may be thus described as a decentralised assemblage actor, sitting at the crossover of human and machine, with its circuit boards, cables, buttons and triggers, or the game engine’s running in the background. (Fizek 206)
The most well-known manifestation of this behaviour in the case of Pokémon Go is the use of third-party software by players who intend to cheat the GPS tracking function within the game to earn extra experience points. This is a representative case of the manner in which artificial life often attains autonomy in a postmodern cybertext, since the individual player takes a backseat while automated bots play against each other. Not surprisingly, this practice is regularly condemned and punished as unethical by the developers as harmful to the “integrity of the community” (Hernandez 2017), even though the existence of “spoofers” in the Pokémon Go community is well-known. Especially to an Indian gamer, the hypocrisy in this notion of “integrity” would be evident since, rather than levelling the playing field, it serves to preserve the advantages that a Western or urban player would have over a postcolonial player. The conservatism implicit in this idea of ethicality is apparent since, beneath this establishment of the free market functions a politics of mapping representative of the actual Techno-feudalistic nature of Neoliberalism. The concentration of gyms and pokestops is notably higher in urban areas, thus causing inconvenience for the players from more rural areas of India, especially in the time of the pandemic, since they cannot travel to an area with an abundance of resources. The integration of posthuman agency in the game, hence, proves to be an effective mode of writing back for the Indian gamers.
This makes the structure of the game, in fact, even more truly mirror the Neoliberal world order owing to the posthuman nature of the emergent behaviour. The Neoliberal subject has developed a dependence on non-human agency owing to the proliferation of contingent relations, which has made successful human-level computation next to impossible. Consequently, the gamers are compulsively partaking in faith-based community experience to improve their chances, mirroring the advent of occult economy in the new millennia (Comeroff and Comeroff 1999). As with any faith-based organization, the possibility of radical mobilization of opinions lurks in these communities, and the game developers have capitalized upon this tendency by making the gamers choose between three teams – Valor, Instinct, and Mystic. The occasional toxicity of this quasi-sectarian organization is easily visible on online social media platforms where the players continue the in-game conflicts. However, the automated structure of the game also keeps it from becoming entirely dogmatic, since there are no certain principles around which these cyber-communities are securely organized or stratified from within, thus leaving enough scope for non-serious interactions and critical distance. The very notion of fidelity that dogmatism requires is rendered spectral by the constant alterations of the principles of the game.
This combination of the serious and the non-serious in the game’s and the gaming community’s behaviours can be understood in terms of the relative presence of the elements of ludus and paidia (Caillois 26). Ludus indicates a teleologically oriented game whose finality lies in the determination of winners and losers, while paidia signifies gaming designs that looks beyond the binary culture of success-oriented behaviors. Since much of the content of the game centres around pokémon battles, and the levelling of players functions as a basic motivation of the game, it is bound to lead to the creation of competitive hierarchical cyber-communities. However, Pokémon Go also offers an open-world gaming experience in which apparently insignificant behaviours might be indulged in (even at times rewarding them through future updates). Paidia hence encourages the Bataillian laughter that may dwarf the Hegelian master-slave dialectics of ludus. In other words, while the game does upon occasions develop a tendency towards dogmatic chauvinism among the players, the majority of cyber-community can be likened to a Bataillian community or Nancy’s “inoperative community”—communities whose strength lie in not the commonalities of certain principles, but in the pleasure of the absence of deterministic principles. Certainly, the participants constituting these communities have a lot in common, chief among them being one or multiple accounts in Pokémon Go. But, beyond these basic commonalities is the heterogeneous core of the communities which recognizes that there is no finality to the laws laid out by the developer. This inadequacy of the ludus signifies the general inadequacy of the Rational Choice Theory which was supposed to define the human.
It is therefore interesting to observe that, besides the false, imperialist form of freedom that Pokémon Go projects, thanks to its artificial life, the game offers a posthuman freedom that can be exercised in the non-serious domain both within the game’s open world and in the cyber-community. While at the end of Homo Ludens, Huizinga laments the evaporation of the element of play from games, the non-human spectrality of the principles around which the gaming communities are organized signify the inexhaustible presence of the ludic element, as made evident by the game’s proving to be a continuous source of Internet memes. While humanism defines the subject as a rational being, the primacy of paidia proves Adorno and Horkheimer’s contention that the key motivator for the Enlightenment subject is not reason but pleasure, the pleasure of mastery over the unreasonable other. But, now, we have entered the point where this pleasure is finding the mold of rationality inadequate, and hence occurs the rupture of the human. This rupture of rationality corresponds with the overpowering of the humanist intentionality by the game’s artificial life. Hence, the transgressive outbreak of the Bataillian laughter at Moloch’s consumption of the totality and consequent regurgitation of this global simulation.
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