Can’t catch ‘em all: Collecting, subcultural capital and the fear of missing out in Pokémon Go

I have argued previously that the physical objects that make up a collection “are semiotic signifiers of self, and how fans use, display and exchange them is determined by processes similar to those defined by subcultural distinction and the accumulation of fan cultural capital” (Geraghty, 2014: 33). However, what happens when those objects are not physical? How does subcultural capital form when collections are ephemeral, digital and stored on personal electronic devices? Answers to these questions can be found in the fan community of Niantic’s AR game, Pokémon Go. Practices of collecting within this fandom are built on trading, IRL events and travel. The number of digital Pokémon players have in their storage, their individual rarity, difficulty to obtain, and where they were originally caught become important factors in creating subcultural capital. In turn, this capital helps secure players’ position in the community, increasing their status and turning them into renowned fans. However, to build an in-game collection that creates subcultural identity requires a lot of work, time, financial investment and extensive travel to global locations in order to collect some of the rarest Pokémon.
Therefore, this chapter asserts that the fear of missing out (FOMO) characterises digital collecting in Pokémon Go. Not being able to travel to global events, the inability to obtain new Pokémon when released before anyone else, or the lack of luck in finding and trading increases players’ fear of an incomplete collection and being left out. FOMO has been defined as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent…. characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing” (Przybylski et al., 2013: 1841). By extension, some describe it as a form of social structure associated with the failure to access any kind of information in settings that include texts or multimedia (Hetz et al., 2015). This latter definition would certainly characterise FOMO in Pokémon Go. The game requires the use of multimedia in terms of the AR game itself but also promotes using social media and Niantic’s own Campfire app in order to play IRL exclusive ticketed events and show off in-game achievements.
Through an analysis of Pokémon Go, its IRL events, practices of building a digital collection, and fan posts on social media platforms, this chapter will discuss how FOMO characterises this collecting phenomenon. It will consider how physical geography and game play has been re-established in the new, globalized digital realm, and address the extent to which, by turning collecting into a combination of both online activity and in-person presence, practices of digital acquisition that shape the wider Pokémon fan community are affected by the fear of missing out.