Like many people, the seemingly instantaneous eruption this month of Pokémon Go as a cultural phenomenon took me by surprise.
I learned about it while sitting on my front porch one evening early last week. Large groups of people I didn’t recognize (along with a smattering of people I did recognize) were walking around the neighborhood gazing at their phones―but not in the usual distracted way that people walk and gaze at their phones. These people clearly had something specific and shared that they were doing.
My teenage son clued me in as to what was going on.
My initial response was one of smug condescension. I smirked and laughed at the ridiculousness of the game and got my son to join me―which I now see was just him humoring me. I tweeted something I thought was cute and incisive.
I tweeted a link to an article that also saw itself as cute and incisive.
Then I went about my day like this new gaming craze was unimportant.
I’ve changed my mind. I’ve come to think that Pokémon Go is great.
I haven’t started playing the game and I don’t really have any interest in doing so but I love the fact that Pokémon Go is getting large numbers of people out of their houses and into their communities. My small-town neighborhood feels more alive now than at any time in the nearly twenty years that I’ve lived here. All day and late into the evening there are groups of teenagers and young adults hanging out together at Poké stops and Poké gyms. I love that my son’s friends will ride their bikes up to our house in the evening and my son will grab his bike and they’ll all take off to play until late.
I know that what I’m saying here reflects a certain amount of nostalgia for what I remember as carefree summer nights back in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m fine with that.
However, my appreciation for the game goes beyond nostalgia and it goes beyond my parental pleasure at seeing my son out having fun with his friends. I know several people who own small businesses in my town and some of them have told me that Pokémon Go has brought new people into their shops. That’s good. Moreover, some of these new customers admit to suffering from social anxiety and they credit Pokémon Go with helping them to be more confident out in the world. That seems good to me, too.
I’m well aware of some of the concerns that have been voiced about Pokémon Go―the privacy settings on phones, the need to be aware of one’s surroundings while playing, etc. Those are legitimate concerns and I’ve talked with my son (and now his younger sister) about them but I don’t want to get them too bogged down with the hand-wringing nervousness so endemic in America today. I want them to have fun.
Some pundits are telling us that augmented reality games such as Pokémon Go are the future of gaming. I’ll leave that argument for those whose careers are built around such things. If that does turn out to be where we’re headed, and if that means that I can look forward to many more years of lively small town streets, count me in.
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