Culture, according to a certain strand of grouchy leftist criticism, is turning us all into children. The dominant forms, the ones that not only rake in the most money but code the cultural terrain itself, are video games, which are for children, and superhero films, which are also for children.

It’s not just a question of genre, though: these forms demand a particular type of engagement, that of a vicious, sticky-fingered child — you’re to not just pay the price of admission but support the culture-commodity uncritically, identify with its characters, buy the action figures, nurture an obsession verging on the pathological. Act, in other words, with the rapacious glee of a dull child.

Any other mode of engagement is tacitly forbidden. Look at the fury of the fans when someone tries to approach mass culture with any critical judgement. Why are you being so serious about this, so pretentious; it’s just a film or a game, it’s meaningless — but at the same time, how dare you, you’re ruining my fun.

For many critics, we’re living out an apocalyptic scenario. This is about Pokémon Go, of course it’s about Pokémon Go — how else could you describe a world in grown adults in their millions are milling about aimlessly, staring at their phones, collecting digital rats, reliving a stupid childhood, and shrinking all the while into inattentive sugar-zapped brats?

All this is a strong critique of the game, but it’s not the one I’m interested in pursuing. Never mind the infantilized adults; what do children, actual children, do? At play, in their masses and unmediated by anything other than the imagination, they do something spontaneous and incredible: they create new worlds.

These worlds are generally not in the form of a pure escapist fantasy, but a radical reinterpretation of actual existence — the invention of new ways of mapping and systematizing reality, a series of experiments in the plasticity of space.

Start with sidewalks: if you step on the cracks, something horrible will happen to you; you’ll break your back, or a bear will eat you up. Sometimes the floor is lava, and a pyroclastic code transforms the dull world of objects. Sometimes a gang of children will turn into astronauts and aliens; parked cars swell to the size of planets, falling leaves thunder past as treacherous asteroid fields.

Everything is alive with potential significations, the world exists to be knocked down and rebuilt. And this is the promise of Pokémon Go: all you need to do is download the app, and you’re suddenly thrust into a different world, a bright and energetic version of reality stalked by incredible monsters.

All this should be of interest to the Left; after all, one of the most enduring revolutionary slogans of recent times states that “another world is possible.” As Marxists, we should be interested in changing the world — not just altering government policy, or even swapping one ruling class for another, but swapping the human experience of reality from one that is alienated to one that is liberated.

In his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx describes the subject-object relation that results from unalienated labour: “The object of labour is the objectification of man’s species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created.” In Heidegger the condition of Dasein (the human Being) is Geworfenheit, thrown-ness, of being pitched into the dejectedness of what indifferently is.

Marx sees a way out of alienation in the intentional exercise of consciousness on the world. And this free, spontaneous, transformational exercise of species-being really does take place all around us. For all the terrors and cruelties of infantile phenomenology (and we shouldn’t valorize children too much — after all, another almost inevitable feature of their play is the systematic bullying of the weak), nobody could see in children pretending to be explorers or bank robbers the chains and drudgery of alienated work.

If something like Pokémon Go really could turn adults into children again, it might have some value. What it actually does is very different.