Monsters Then And Now
My Pokemon Go theory, FWIW.
Pokemon – huge, long running franchise. Always basically the same. Pokemon are super-powered animals who live in the wild – fields, caves, lakes. There’s generally a clear conceptual boundary between the places humans live and work in (with almost no wild Pokemon) and the places you catch Pokemon in.
Pokemon becomes a cultural icon and a cash cow brand for its owners. It has no serious rivals, until 2013, when Yo-Kai Watch is released in Japan and outstrips Pokemon in popularity, becoming a comparable phenomenon. Pokemon clearly needs to learn from its new rival – but what makes Yo-Kai Watch so appealing?
Yo-Kai watch is obviously very like Pokemon – monsters, collection thereof, &c. But its conception of catching and finding monsters is quite different. There is no clear boundary between the Yo-Kai World and the Human World: Yo-Kai are a layer of reality on top of everyday life. They are highly urbanised, and potentially everywhere – indoors, outdoors, in streets and building and monuments – but to see them you need a device that detects them and lets you view them.
Pokemon was based on the idea of exploration – you go out into the wilderness and come back with something marvellous. Yo-Kai Watch is based on something more like psychogeography – the marvellous is already all around you, you just need to see it. You can map it onto changing ideas of what it’s safe for kids to do outdoors, rapid urbanisation, and so on. Different games, different generations.
By this point you’ll probably have realised that Pokemon Go is a hell of a lot more like Yo-Kai Watch in this regard than it is like Pokemon. It’s the ultimate smackdown response to the upstart challenger, but it also realises how much better an intuitive fit the Yo-Kai monster cosmology is to modern life (and smartphone technology) than the butterfly-net model of old school Pokemon.