“There’s a wild Pidgey in our kitchen,” my brother announced this morning.
I reluctantly turned away from the refrigerator—in our kitchen—and didn’t see any bird Pokémon in the immediate vicinity. My brother, however, pointed his iPhone at a random tile on the ground and began swiping violently at his screen. I looked over his shoulder at the phone, which looked like it was ready to take a picture, except with a Pokémon superimposed on top of the ordinary image. And there it was: a small bird casually relaxing in our home, not giving a single damn that it was interrupting my breakfast. A Pokeball flew across the screen, and the Pidgey disappeared in a flash of light.
And that was my introduction to Pokémon GO, the apparent fulfillment of all my childhood dreams. I had grown up playing LeafGreen on my Gameboy and Platinum on the DS, gaining fond memories of raising my Charizard and Empoleon to level 100, deleting all non-damaging moves like a fool and screaming at gym leaders. However, I lacked the time and the funds to keep playing after Gen IV, and I was in shock when I realized a mere two months ago that in the newer handheld games, the graphics are so good that the trainers actually look like people and not just little squares. So when I found out that you could actually go outside and find wild Pokémon (and more importantly, that the app was free,) I was ready to immediately run outside and really be the best that no one ever was.
I soon discovered that my phone’s IOS was outdated and that I couldn’t download the app. One short heartbreak later, I decided to follow my brother outside on his romp around the neighborhood to find Pokémon. My heart was then more seriously shattered because Pokémon GO is not the Pokémon of your childhood.
You don’t battle the Pokémon to catch them. You wander around, wait for the little blip to appear on your map, stalk them and force them into your Pokeballs. Sometimes they run, but that is their only form of self-defense. There is no struggle for dominance, no hatred, no eventual grudging respect. This game is a metaphor for the millennial existence. There is no work to conquer these wild beasts, but only an implicit expectation that all that is desired shall be received. How do you level up your Pokémon if you don’t battle, then? Even your Pokémon are not strengthened through trial and tribulation, but rather when you capture a whole bunch of the same species. You cannot strategize, suffer or lose. Instead, you grind endlessly, carrying out the same activity for hours on end with no real spiritual or emotional gain. Your Pokémon only have one stat, Character Power, and they can be leveled up with stardust and candy. This is not a joke.
Even when you do battle others at gyms set at real-life landmarks, the basic mechanics have been stripped away. You have no moves to choose from, no stats to increase or decrease and no damage to calculate. Instead, you tap and swipe, tap and swipe, attack and defend. The very essence of the games has been removed in favor of simplicity and ease. This is not the Pokémon you have grown up to love, only a cheap mockery.
A car can also very easily hit you when you’re playing. When I went out with my brother, he spent the whole time bent over his phone, watching for little blips. Sometimes Pokémon spawn in the middle of the street. Or you might fall over a crack in the sidewalk, or walk face-first into someone else also searching for a Rattata. The possibilities for injuring yourself when you’re not paying attention to the real world are endless.
Still, Pokémon GO has some benefits. Several people (including my brother, who rarely left his room before the app’s release) have more than doubled their daily steps taken. Others have met up at PokeSpots or gyms by accident and bonded over their shared love of the game. And the game is still new, as is evident by their servers continually crashing. Nintendo has plenty of time to fix the game, to listen to the complaints of fans and make adjustments to meet the expectations of all generations. Meaning, they better fix the goddamn game.
