MC Hammer Presents: The Hammer of Transformative Nostalgification - Designing for Engagement at Scale.

We argue that the huge success of Augmented Reality game Pokémon Go has little to do with clever design. Rather, the success is due to the nostalgic branding, with a franchise for which people already have great affection. As exasperated academics, rather than resist, we have decided to sell out. We suggest that a similar nostalgic branding strategy allows any mildly interesting HCI project to gain similarly huge benefits of public engagement. We provide the HCI community with a crude nostalgification tool -- MC Hammer's Hammer of Nostalgification -- and present a number of case studies that illustrate its power.