Location-based games let retailers pay tiny sums to direct real foot traffic.

Evidence

The unprecedented pattern was faintly discernible within days of the game’s launch. A Virginia bar offered a discount to a Pokémon Go team; a tea shop in San Francisco offered a “buy one get one free” to the game’s players. The owner of a pizza bar in Queens, New York, paid about $10 for “Lure Modules,” a bit of virtual game paraphernalia intended to attract Pokémon to a specific location, successfully producing virtual creatures on bar stools and in bathroom stalls. During the first weekend of game play, the bar’s food and drink sales shot up by 30 percent and later were reported to be 70 percent above average. Bloomberg reporters gushed that the game had achieved the retailers’ elusive dream of using location tracking to drive foot traffic: “It’s easy to imagine a developer selling ads within the game world to local merchants, or even auctioning off the promise to turn specific shops and restaurants into destinations for players.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 988

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ and especially ‘Grafting’ themes of infrastructure — here, virtual game items as worldbuilding/placemaking infrastructure that reroutes physical human flow.
• SEED: A piece on how virtual lure items became de facto urban infrastructure — private payments quietly shaping where crowds physically gather in public space.
• XREF: connects to: Sponsored locations transform game play into behavioral futures markets for real-world customers. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 992; Augmented-reality games physically claim private space through GPS coordinates — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 971

Broader Connections

• Sponsored locations transform game play into behavioral futures markets for real-world customers. #expands (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 992
• Augmented-reality games physically claim private space through GPS coordinates #qualifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 971