The Pokemon Go Craze: My thoughts

Pokémon Go; it’s a bona fide phenomenon, snagging thousands upon thousands of players who are all running around on their smartphones continuing that twenty year old tradition of “Catching them all”. What started off as a simple April Fool’s joke has transformed into something that could completely turn things around for Nintendo, who have been struggling in the game industry and it all came down to moving a popular handheld franchise over to the vast mobile market.

Pokémon Go is focused on geo-caching and augmented reality using your phone’s camera; to find the best Pokémon you have to go outside, explore around (sometimes during the right time of day or night) and flick the screen (Very much like Paper Toss) to chuck a Pokeball to catch the coveted creatures. For example you may find a water type Pokémon near a lake or pond whereas ghost Pokémon only really show up at night. You can then go to designated Pokestops to trade items and as your collection grows, you gain levels and can eventually join one of three teams, battling at Pokémon gyms just as you do in the original Nintendo titles.

So what is it about Pokémon Go that has people playing it so religiously? While it may dumb down and simplify the gameplay usually associated with the series, it has one thing that its Nintendo handheld counterpart doesn’t; a sense of personal engagement. Rather than controlling a young boy or girl in a fully virtual environment, you feel as if you yourself are embarking on your own little journey rather than simply controlling a nameless character. Then of course there’s the smartphone market which comprises millions of users all over the world; with that comes a compulsion to best your friends and catch the rarest Pokémon. By putting the game on smartphones, Pokemon is now more easily accessible than ever before; which is quite unthinkable considering where the series came from originally.

Back when Pokémon was first sweeping through the playground in the nineties and early 2000s, I looked on with envy at the other kids who were lucky enough to own Game Boy Colours and copies of Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow; heck I even had a little handbook (See above picture) with all 150 of the original pocket monsters. When I was seven or eight years old, my imagination ran wild at the perfect team of six and how I would go about catching each of them. I also got into the Pokémon Trading Card game at the time, despite my deck (the best of which being a simple Machamp) being hopelessly outclassed by the likes of rare shiny cards and other powerful Pokémon. It wasn’t until around 2010 when I played through a Pokémon game, Platinum on my little brother’s DS to be exact. The formula has gone unchanged over the years and yet it still stands as one of the most addictive formulas in gaming history. With Pokémon Go just about anyone can jump in and play; in that sense people have pointed out the app’s potential to bring people together while also gamifying things like tourism with the incentive the series has always capitalised on over the years.

Sadly it’s not all good news. While the app itself does give fair warning to stay alert to its users, there’s no doubt that Pokémon Go has already resulted in more than a few injuries and questionable incidents. A US Holocaust Museum had to tell players to stop playing the game at an inappropriate location. One man in New Zealand literally quit his job to play the game full time and another young girl even found a dead body while roaming around in the States. These incidents are quite telling to me; people were already using their smartphone frequently for Candy Crush and now we have a game that almost constantly focuses your attention on the screen. Does this kind of game have the potential to completely change the nature of modern society?

Because of this I’m not planning on getting into Pokémon Go myself; I already use my smartphone enough for watching YouTube videos, checking Facebook and reading my emails. I don’t need another reason to be glued to my devices. A friend of mine from university recently called it a drug and I’m inclined to believe him. As for the game itself it will no doubt continue to carve a swath through the population and Nintendo is probably breathing a sigh of relief as its shares jumped 70% in just one week. It may be wildly popular and fun for those who play it but it’s also an app that should definitely be watched closely as time goes on, especially for the effect it has on the overall populous.