精靈寶可夢Go 手遊喊你出來玩

Pokémon Go Brings Augmented Reality to a Mass Audience

別宅了，“精靈寶可夢Go”手遊喊你出來玩

SAN FRANCISCO — There are video games that go viral overnight, causing people to coop themselves up in their homes for days to play.

舊金山——有些電子遊戲一夜爆紅，導致人們成天宅在家裏打遊戲。

But the opposite has happened with “Pokémon Go,” a free smartphone game that has soared to the top of the download charts: It has sent people into streets and parks, onto beaches and even out to sea in a kayak in the week since it was released. The game — in which players try to capture exotic monsters from Pokémon, the Japanese cartoon franchise — uses a combination of ordinary technologies built into smartphones, including location tracking and cameras, to encourage people to visit public landmarks, seeking virtual loot and collectible characters that they try to nab.

但《精靈寶可夢Go》(Pokémon Go)恰恰相反。這是一款免費的智能手機遊戲，已躍升至下載排行榜的榜首：在發佈後的這一週裏，它促使人們走向街頭和公園、踏上海灘甚至乘坐獨木舟出海。在這款遊戲中，玩家要努力捕獲源自日本漫畫系列《精靈寶可夢》(Pokémon)的怪物。它結合了智能手機的常見技術，如定位和攝像頭，鼓勵人們去公共場所，尋找虛擬貨幣和他們想要捕捉和收集的精靈。

Boon Sheridan, of Holyoke, Massachusetts, has seen the activity firsthand. His home, a converted gable-roofed church that once attracted worshippers, had without his knowledge been designated a Pokémon “gym,” a place where players who reach Level 5 in the game must go to train their Pokémon characters. In the last week, he has been wondering how to explain to neighbors all the people who congregated on the sidewalk and pulled up at odd hours.

馬薩諸塞州霍利奧克的布恩·謝里登(Boon Sheridan)親眼看到了這些活動。他家在改造前是一座三角屋頂的教堂，曾經是很多人做禮拜的地方。在他不知情的情況下，他家被指定爲寶可夢“道館”。遊戲中達到五級的玩家必須去道館裏訓練自己的寶可夢精靈。上週，他一直在考慮該怎麼向鄰居解釋那些聚集在人行道和在奇怪的時間靠邊停車的人。

“I want to make sure I tell them, ‘Hey, I’m not a drug dealer,'” Sheridan said. “I know there are people pulling up in front of the house all the time, but trust me I have no say in this.”

“我想和他們明確一點，‘嘿，我不是毒販子，’”謝里登說。“我知道老是有人把車停在我家門口，但相信我，這事由不得我。”

On Sunday, San Francisco’s parks and downtown were crawling with “Pokémon Go” players who trained their phone cameras at trees and playgrounds as they looked for characters to pop up on their screens. In Washington, the White House and the Pentagon have been designated official Pokémon gyms. A bar in Harrisburg, Virginia, was offering a 10 percent discount to “Pokémon Go” players on a specific team, while a tea shop in Japantown in San Francisco offered a “buy one tea, get one free” deal to Pokémon Go players.

週日，舊金山的公園和市中心擠滿了精靈寶可夢Go玩家。他們把手機的攝像頭對準樹木和遊樂場，尋找可能會出現在屏幕上的精靈。在華盛頓，白宮和五角大樓均被指定爲正式的寶可夢道館。弗吉尼亞州哈里斯堡的一個酒吧給一個特定陣營的精靈寶可夢Go玩家打九折，舊金山日本城的一家茶館推出了面向精靈寶可夢Go玩家的“買一贈一”活動。

“Pokémon Go” represents one of those moments when a new technology — in this case, augmented reality or AR, which fuses digital technology with the physical world — breaks through from a niche toy for early adopters to something much bigger. The idea behind the technology is to overlay digital imagery on a person’s view of the real world, using a smartphone screen or a headset.

《精靈寶可夢Go》是一項新技術突破早期嚐鮮用戶的小衆圈子，接觸更大範圍受衆的案例——具體到本例是將數字技術與現實世界相結合的增強現實（augmented reality，簡稱AR）技術。這項技術背後的設想是利用智能手機屏幕或頭戴設備，將數字圖像覆蓋在一個人看到的真實場景上。

Many technology companies thought AR might first take off through specialized business applications that, for example, allow architects to visualize finished building projects in situ. Instead, it took a game based on a beloved entertainment franchise from the mid-1990s in Japan to help the technology go mainstream.

很多科技公司本以爲，AR可能會最先通過專業的商業應用取得成功，比如讓建築師可以在實地將設計方案視覺化的應用。但事實上是一款遊戲幫助這項技術走向了主流。這款遊戲改編自日本上世紀90年代中期開始的一個備受歡迎的娛樂系列。

Pokémon, a hybrid of the words “pocket” and “monsters,” belongs to the Pokémon Co., which is partly owned by Nintendo, the Japanese game pioneer, which has struggled to adapt to the era of gaming on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. In the cartoon, Pokémon trainers use characters to battle each other for sport. The uptake of “Pokémon Go,” which is so far available only in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, has been so furious that it sent Nintendo’s market capitalization soaring $9 billion in the last few days.

Pokémon是“pocket”（口袋）和“monsters”（精靈）兩個詞的組合。它是寶可夢公司(Pokémon Co.)旗下的品牌，公司的持有者之一是任天堂(Nintendo)。作爲日本遊戲行業的先驅，任天堂一直在努力適應這個在智能手機和平板電腦等移動設備上打遊戲的時代。在漫畫中，寶可夢的訓練師讓各自的角色進行對戰。《精靈寶可夢Go》迄今僅在美國、澳大利亞和新西蘭發佈。它如此成功，以至任天堂的市值在過去幾天增加了90億美元。

“Pokémon Go,” though, is actually the work of a startup, Niantic Inc., which was created inside Google and spun out of the company last year. Niantic’s first game, a science-fiction conspiracy thriller called “Ingress,” was made possible by Google’s digital mapping service. About 15 million users have downloaded Ingress, and there are a little over 1 million active players a month, said John Hanke, Niantic’s chief executive.

但《精靈寶可夢Go》其實只是一家名爲Niantic的創業公司的作品。該公司成立於谷歌(Google)內部，去年從公司剝離。它的第一款遊戲叫Ingress，是一款科幻類的陰謀驚悚遊戲，藉助了谷歌的數字地圖服務。Niantic的首席執行官約翰·漢克(John Hanke)表示，約有1500萬用戶下載了Ingress，月活躍玩家略多於100萬。

Niantic partnered with the Pokémon Co. to make “Pokémon Go.” Hanke said he didn’t have exact numbers of players, but that it was safe to say it will be “quite a bit beyond” the number of players Ingress has attracted. Downloads have been so frequent that Niantic’s servers had trouble handling the traffic and the company is struggling to add additional capacity. Hanke said Niantic was delaying the game’s introduction in additional countries for a few days so it could handle the demand.

Niantic與精靈寶可夢公司合作，製作了《精靈寶可夢Go》。漢克說他不知道具體的玩家數量，但表示可以肯定地說“遠多於”Ingress吸引的玩家。下載非常頻繁，以致Niantic的服務器難以處理流量。該公司正在花大力氣擴容。漢克稱Niantic將遊戲在另外一些國家的發佈推遲了幾天，這樣才能應對需求。

“We expected it to be popular, but we didn’t expect it to be like this,” he said. “We’re just getting our feet underneath us.”

“我們預計它會受歡迎，但沒料到會這麼受歡迎，”他說。“我們纔剛剛穩住陣腳。”

Like the most successful mobile games, while “Pokémon Go” is free to play, it gives players opportunities to buy virtual items for a few dollars to speed up their progress. The game’s real-world nature also gives Niantic another intriguing moneymaking possibility, by charging fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other retail establishments to become sponsored locations where people are motivated to go to pick up virtual loot.

和大部分成功的移動遊戲一樣，儘管《精靈寶可夢Go》是免費的，但它讓玩家可以花幾美元購買虛擬物品，加速升級過程。遊戲與真實世界相結合的本質還給Niantic提供了另一個奇妙的盈利機會，即向快餐店、咖啡館和其他零售場所收費，讓其成爲贊助機構，鼓勵玩家去這些地方獲取虛擬物品。

Niantic has cut deals like that for “Ingress,” and Hanke said the company would announce sponsored locations for “Pokémon Go” in the future.

Niantic已通過Ingress進行過這類交易，漢克也表示公司將來會宣佈《精靈寶可夢Go》的贊助場所。

Brad Ensworth, a San Francisco State University student who played the game over the weekend, said he had never been a fan of augmented-reality gaming before “Pokémon Go,” but was drawn in by the game’s surprisingly social aspect.

週末玩過該遊戲的舊金山州立大學(San Francisco State University)學生布拉德·恩斯沃思(Brad Ensworth)說，在《精靈寶可夢Go》之前，他從來沒迷戀過增強現實遊戲，但卻被該遊戲出奇的社交特色吸引了。

“You’ll just run into people and spark up conversations immediately,” he said while playing the game in Golden Gate Park. “We met this one guy who drove up from San Jose to collect Pokémon in the park, and he had more knowledge about this game than anyone else we’ve met so far. We called him the Guru.”

“你會跑進人羣，立刻開始交談，”正在金門公園(Golden Gate Park)裏玩遊戲的他說。“我們認識的這個夥計從聖何塞一路開車來到這個公園，就是爲了抓寶可夢。他對這個遊戲的瞭解，比我們迄今爲止認識的其他任何人都多。我們叫他‘上師’。”

“Pokémon Go” mass gatherings are also on the horizon. Sara Witsch, a theater studies major at San Francisco State University, organized a Facebook group for a “'Pokémon Go’ crawl” that is tentatively scheduled for July 20. As of Sunday evening, more than 18,000 people had indicated they were interested in attending, and more than 3,700 confirmed that they would be there.

精靈寶可夢Go聚會也在出現。爲了暫定於7月20日舉行的活動“精靈寶可夢Go大串場”，舊金山州立大學戲劇研究專業的學生薩拉·維奇(Sara Witsch)在Facebook上創建了一個小組。截至週日傍晚，已有逾1.8萬人表示對活動感興趣，超過3700人確認自己會參加。