For the past week or so, all I have seen on social media sites are people posting about playing Pokémon Go. So many people have been saying, "This is the game I've been waiting for my whole life," or "I used to play Pokémon as a kid and now I get to play it as a twenty-year-old who has nothing better to do on a Tuesday night," or "It's a lot of fun and a great way to get out of the house." As the avid writer I am, I wanted to write an article about it. But of course, that would mean I would actually have to play. I did not want to play this Pokémon game. I have never once in my life had the desire to play anything that has to do with Pokémon. For the sake of this article, though, I tossed all of those thoughts aside and walked around for an hour and a half trying to figure out this Pokémon craze.
I began by walking around downtown Springfield, Missouri, with a friend. My friend is very into Pokémon Go. He has spent the last week walking around parks and sites throughout the city trying to catch strange virtual creatures. He tried to teach me how.
All I grasped in the hour and a half of playing is that you walk around aimlessly as your avatar on the Pokémon Go app walks to PokéStops, where you can potentially catch a Pokémon. If a Pokémon appears, you have to throw a virtual Poké Ball at it to capture it. Then you walk and walk and walk some more to catch more Pokémon. Apparently you sometimes can steal Pokémon from other people and/or have battles with other users as well. That part is over my head.
What I liked most about playing Pokémon Go was that I logged nearly 5,000 steps while playing. Yes, people do get a significant amount of exercise while playing. But, people are still glued to their phones, obsessively staring at their phone screen trying to find the next Pokémon.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me how intense people got when I played. It's almost like the hundreds of people in downtown Springfield, Missouri, had seen a tweet saying, "There's a thousand dollars somewhere downtown, go find it!" or "Beyonce is in downtown Springfield. Go find her!" Because all of a sudden, I'd see a group of four teenage boys running down the street, phones in hand. Obviously, no. Those boys were not after cash or Beyonce. They were not after anything tangible, anything with an actual reward or outcome, for that matter.
Pokémon fans throughout the world may shun me, but my conclusion is that I still don't understand the craze. I don't understand how people don't get bored with it after a few minutes and how they get so passionate about funny-looking characters on an app. I don't understand why anyone would spend time on something silly like Pokémon Go. That being said, it's not my place to tell the world to stop doing what they love. If you want to play, then play. But I, for one, will not.
