UC Riverside

This article explores the networked, affective, and embodied gameplay and potential of Niantic’s 2016 augmented reality smartphone game, Pokémon Go. Following affective critique in videogame and digital studies (Anable, Hayles, et al.,) and literary notions of the “grotesque and carnivalesque” (Bakhtin), I emphasize the important and often overlooked role of embodiment in hypertext, hypermedia, and digital smartphone technology. By framing Pokémon Go in relation to Shelley Jackson’s 1995 hypertext, Patchwork Girl, I identify a specific transformative moment that reactivates Bakhtin’s carnivalesque through the embodied gameplay of the digital mobile network. Pokémon Go’s digitally mediated gameplay demonstrates how mobile gaming, and perhaps all mobile computing, in general, serves to further expand the transformative implications and uncertain possibilities of embodiment as the digital takes on new forms. This observable, transductive transformation, I argue, demonstrates a reactivation of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in the digitally mediated mode of the technological carnivalesque.