Gotta Scan ’em All: How Pokémon Go Turned Its Players Into Pentagon Cartographers – The Cradle

 Gotta Scan ’em All: How Pokémon Go Turned Its Players Into Pentagon Cartographers

Pokémon Go players supplied billions of street-level scans to Niantic’s mapping systems. Years later, the technology they helped build is being adapted for drones operating beyond the reach of GPS.

For nine years, Pokémon Go asked its players to go outside and “catch ‘em all.” Millions of children and their parents walked through their cities with cameras raised. Some, chasing in-game rewards, filmed statues, parks, street corners and, in at least one case, the inside of an apartment. Someone else was gathering the results.

In June, Dutch daily Trouw traced how roughly 30 billion player scans helped train Niantic’s mapping systems. Niantic Spatial has since partnered with Vantor, the rebranded Maxar Intelligence and a major US defense contractor, to develop visual positioning for drones and other platforms in GPS-denied areas.

Vantor serves defense and intelligence clients and provides satellite imagery used widely in western reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.

A game largely played by children had helped build technology now being adapted for US military use.

The game designer and media philosopher Ian Bogost saw the mechanism coming. In 2011 he proposed an honest name for the industry of points, badges and engineered rewards: “exploitationware.” Fifteen years later, Pokémon Go offered a striking example of what he meant.

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Related: 3/21 — ‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots

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