About

About the community

The purpose of Sydney, Australia’s online Pokémon Go community is for players to curate and discuss content specific to gameplay in Sydney. An in-depth analysis of the first fifty-five posts, tweets, videos and messages shared within the bounds of the community reveals eight different themes of communication present.

Theme	Description
Sociality	Promotion or request of other social media group related to the community; promotion or request of in-game friends via Trainer Code; promotion or request of out-game friends.
Social help and empathy	Evocative post requesting empathy concerning difficulty of gameplay; promotion of game-related art.
Game help	Promotion or request for trading; promotion or request for location of raid, PokeStop or monster, sometimes with specific coordinates; promotion or request for help with research task.
Validation	Celebratory post of successful catch of monster; celebratory post of successful completion of research task.
Discussion and humour	Personal post; meme; general discussion post about different usages of in-game features.
Game and event news	Promotion or request for in- and out-game event information.
Miscellaneous	Moderator or admin post; unrelated to the community.
Complaints	Complaint about game error.

The below graphs demonstrate the extent to which each theme was represented on the community’s three main platforms:

Baym (2010, pp. 118-124) identifies ‘shared resources and support’ as one of five qualities which constitute a digital community. The data collected suggests that fans of Pokémon Go congregate in online spaces most commonly in order to fulfil this quality.

Members exchange Kibby’s (2010) social ‘subcultural capital’ (Baym 2010, p. 121) in the form of ‘informational support’ (p. 122). Informational support within the community enables members and users to ‘digitally annotate’ (Walker 2010, p. 36) physical space around them, adding a digital layer atop the city by sharing the locations of monsters, PokéStops, and raids.

Posts documenting a user’s catch seek what Cutrona and Russell (1990, p. 322) describe as esteem support (Baym 2010, p. 121), where commenters reciprocate with encouragement and advice.

Similarly, Cutrona and Russell’s (1990, p. 322) emotional support (Baym 2010, p. 121) reverberates in the empathy expressed through comments, Twitter’s favourite button and Facebook’s Sad React in response to evocative posts concerning grievances with the game’s difficulty and anecdotes about personal life.