The genius of Pokémon Go was to transform the game you see into a higher-order game of surveillance capitalism, a game about a game. The players who took the city as their board, roaming its parks and pizzerias, unwittingly constituted a wholly different kind of human game board for this second and more consequential game. The players in this other real game could not be found in the clot of enthusiasts waving their phones at the edge of David's lawn. In the real game, prediction products take the form of protocols that impose forms of telestimulation intended to prod and herd people across real-world terrains to spend their real-world money in the real-world commercial establishments of Niantic's flesh-and-blood behavioral futures markets.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1000