AUGUST 2019 MACWORLD 51Here’s an
evil...cactus
hiding in the
Macworld
office.Pokémon Go, which in no way prohibits
members of those teams from helping out
someone in another.
That’s only a touch of the increased
depth Wizards Unite offers over Pokémon
Go. By far my favorite is the way its AR
encounters bid you trace out spells with
your fingers on your iPhone’s display,
which I find much more appealing than
tossing a fishing bobber-like ball at critters
in Pokémon Go. The latter always made
failing to catch a Pokémon simply
frustrating. When I try to help Hagrid
wrestle free from a web trap or Luna
Lovegood escape from a fire-breathing
chicken in Wizards Unite, though, I feel as
though there’s a real reason to attempt
pulling off the spell correctly. By
Dumbledore, I feel as though I’m learning.
A SIMPLE PROBLEM
All that, I fear, is why Wizards Unite likely
won’t take off as Pokémon Go did in 2016.
The magic of Pokémon Go sprang from its
simplicity: You didn’t need to know jack
squat about Pokémon to get into it (and, in
fact, even I barely did at the time). You
exercised, you found critters, and you
threw balls at them. You didn’t need to be
able to know a Rattata from a Pikachu to
get into that, and so it succeeded in
pulling in throngs of folks who otherwise
wouldn’t have been caught dead with a
Nintendo 3DS.
Wizards Unite, though, seems to
expect you to know about the very
specific people you find in the so-called
“confoundable” and “foundable” events
popping up around your neighborhood. It
expects you to care about those wands
and wants you to thrill at the name of
Ollivanders. (If you don’t get that
reference, you have an idea of what I’m
talking about.) Pokémon Go was able to
serve as a gateway drug to Pokémon as a
larger concept, but I feel safe in saying that
Wizards Unite will only succeed in uniting
existing fans.
Don’t take that to be a pronouncement
of Wizards Unite’s impending doom.
There’s clearly a market for this sort of