Pokémon, we might say, is an example of what Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2009), writing about video games, call a “game of empire”: a technologically augmented form of social interaction, learning and social practice that stresses agency and creativity but within a very particular, capitalist-driven context. Like the large, multiplayer online worlds that have shocked economists and sociologists by creating gigantic digital societies and economies, Pokémon emerged in a very particular moment of capitalist accumulation. It is a moment when capital is no longer solely interested in command over workers' bodies but is increasingly invested in their minds and social relations. In this age of so-called cognitive capitalism we see the emergence of “playbour,” the blurring of work and play in the sense that, where capitalism is increasingly predicated on crafting subjectivities, the clean divide between labour and leisure begins to erode (Kücklich 2005).

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 366