The Ubiquitous Monster Game

It’s about time for a fun one again. ("Fun." It is fun, but it's also about surveillance and the unintended consequences of new technologies. So, fun.) My last few essays have been a little theory-heavy, so this week is an opportunity to step back to Spring of 2018 and look at a project which I interchangeably call Ubiquitous Monsters or The Ubiquitous Monster Game.

First of all, “The Ubiquitous Monster Game” was a place-holder name in my early planning for the project. I thought I’d eventually come up with something nicer, like “Little Monsters Everywhere” or really just anything a little cooler and more comprehensible. But somehow, I got to the end of the project and it ended up being Ubiquitous Monsters. So Ubiquitous Monsters it has remained. The term “ubiquitous” felt obviously descriptive to me at the time because it was used in fields like ubiquitous computing, which had a strong connection to the concept I was working on. Ubiquitous Monsters would be internet-connected monsters that could be anywhere and everywhere. So what was the Ubiquitous Monster game?

What were Ubiquitous Monsters?

The Ubiquitous Monster game was something that happened off-stage in a larger project I was working on. The big project was a lecture, some fictional research, and a series of product ideas meant to help members of the public think about the possibilities and limitations in the Internet of Things. Giving all kinds of physical things the capacity to connect to the internet all the time could be very good, but has often been shown to be very bad. The idea of the bigger project was to present some options for technologies which would be privacy-sensitive and pro-user. But to introduce these potentially better technologies as possibilities, I first needed to introduce the things that had gone wrong. The lecture was set in the near-future – 2020. I wrote the following to describe the context of the research I was carrying out:

Over the last couple of years, OEMs and mobile phone carriers have begun to roll out 5G capacity. 5G differs from older, legacy forms of mobile internet in that it is faster, has lower latency, and can support a larger number of devices being online at the same time. At the moment, 5G is being used much like 4G, and 3G before it: for accessing maps, checking social media, and receiving emails – all on smartphones.

We're conducting this research, however, because of the unexpected break-out new technology that took the world by storm in January 2020. I'm referring, of course, to Ubiquitous Monsters, which many of you here today have probably even played. For those who don't know it, Ubiquitous Monsters is a little like 2016's hit mobile game, Pokemon Go. But while Pokemon Go uses mobile phones, GPS data, and augmented reality to place virtual creatures in places dictated by digital beacons placed on top of map data, Ubiquitous Monsters comes with real monsters. Like POGs in the 1990s or Shopkins in the 2010s, Ubiquitous Monsters are small plastic toys that can be bought, traded, and collected.

Ubiquitous Monsters take advantage of increasingly affordable computer chips and the capacity of 5G internet to integrate real-time geolocation, NFP, and data transmission capabilities. A Ubiquitous Monsters player can not only collect monsters, but geocache them, use them on the Ubiquitous Monsters social network, trade them with friends while keeping their digital trail, and follow the adventures of the monsters they've traded or left in the wild.

It's this last feature which has had the worst consequences. Because Ubiquitous Monsters not only transmit their current location but also keep track of their travel history, the monster toys have already been used for both ill and good. Police have used Ubiquitous Monsters to track the travels and habits of criminals, including one particularly foolish shoplifter who pinched a set of them from a store. But the tracking capabilities of Ubiquitous Monsters have also been used for ill. Honeypots of monster toys have been set up by criminals who use them to locate the homes of players and then keep tabs on the habits of their potential victims. Their geolocation capabilities also make bullying easier, with children being tracked and followed.

We're conducting research into how 5G internet can be used for social good, avoiding another Ubiquitous Monster incident.

Ubiquitous Monsters were framed in the project as something big that had already happened in society, and which now needed a response and some new thinking. In the way that any new technology which suddenly changes behaviour can lead to soul searching, Ubiquitous Monsters were meant to be the incident off-stage that triggered the research and product sketches I was showing off in the lecture (more on these in another essay, another day). Because Ubiquitous Monsters were off-stage, a sort of elaborated Noodle Incident, they only appeared as a reference, a problem, and one slide in a much larger deck. They were the quiet world-building that had to be mentioned casually to make the narrative work.

Ubiquitous Monsters in context

That’s why I want to look at Ubiquitous Monsters in more depth. By 2018, a lot of things had already happened in the realm of toys and games that make use of location data, record personal information, or build personalization into a physical toy using small electronics. Pokemon Go was a handy example at the time, because news stories about incidents had been very prevalent over the previous year and a half in which it had been available. While Pokemon Go was a location-based game played on smartphones, Skylanders, which had been on the market since 2011, fused a video game with figurines. The Skylanders figurines acted as augmentations to the Skylanders video games, allowing players to save a character’s experience in the game on a transportable, collectible artefact. Add to this the spate of data breaches that had taken place between 2015 and 2018, with internet-enabled children’s toys collecting and insufficiently securing data like voice recordings, and you have the environment in which the Ubiquitous Monsters were born.

You can imagine Ubiquitous Monsters as essentially a combination of Pokemon Go, Skylanders, and any kind of high-hype collectible. The monster figurines are made of plastic, they have back stories, and there are some small electronics built into them. The twist with Ubiquitous Monsters was that they’d all be on the 5G network on their own, reporting their location data all the time, without the intervention of a user's phone. This function was in part because my project was taking place in the context of a series of public events on the possibilities and problems of 5G adoption (which was in the middle of just rolling out at the time). But in the world of whichever non-existent company had designed Ubiquitous Monsters, the rationale was that having the monsters online on their own meant that all the fuss of docking them in order to transmit data wouldn’t be needed. You’d be able to follow monsters in real time, not just look back at their history once you had them near some kind of docking device. So Ubiquitous Monsters are little always-online, always-tracking collectible toys that are, of course, sold in surprise boxes so that trading, selling, and lots of excess purchasing become part of the ecosystem.

Ubiquitous Monsters were also meant to be a very social toy. Because each monster had a story of its own, its travels also became part of the story. If you’re swapping monsters, buying them on the resale market, or giving them as gifts, the story of the monster’s journey also becomes part of the value of the figurine. Or so the marketing material says. My goal in telling the story of the always-on tracking was to highlight risks posed by making that kind of data so accessible. Ubiquitous Monsters were an out-sized example of tracking gone wrong. Most people who voluntarily share their location data share it with friends and family – people they trust. And we generally hope and believe that people who are sharing that data are doing it voluntarily. Ubiquitous Monsters removed the voluntary and selective elements of location tracking and just came with a firehose of everywhere the monster has been. You can imagine this being great for a bully – get a monster your target carries with them, and then you can find out what route they normally walk. It extends further, into even darker places. The monsters effectively double as cheap tracking devices. And if you’re not in the know about what they are and how they work, it’s just an innocuous toy. The scope for illegal and abusive use is massive.

So what are the takeaways from the Ubiquitous Monster Game? There are my usual arguments: intended use is never the only use – people are ingenious, and that can turn out well, or it can turn out badly. Connecting every last item to the internet isn’t the world’s best idea. We saw this recently with the big AWS outage which didn’t just take down services people understand as being “online” but also knocked out control of internet connected devices. Designing something to be online all the time is not always a value add. As for the monsters more specifically, we need to think more than twice before we pack location data into our everyday lives. Malicious tracking may seem like an edge case, but most things are edge cases before they become mainstream. Ubiquitous Monsters were an exercise in asking what would happen if always-online location tracking suddenly became accessible, popular, and desirable, without its ramifications being understood. And that one is a takeaway for all newly-accessible technologies. Sudden mainstreaming comes with all kinds of unintended consequences which we then only discover, both personally and societally, once the monster is already out of the surprise box.